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Two returning collaborators add new pieces, and Léonard Kadid debuts his first — six additions in all, built from the small-diameter hardwoods KNS has worked with since 2009.
Karimoku New Standard builds its furniture from small-diameter hardwoods grown in Japan, timber the industry has historically underused. The brand, founded in 2009 and built on the manufacturing expertise of Karimoku Furniture, ties that sourcing to a broader goal: helping conserve Japan’s forests and support the communities that work them. This June, two returning collaborators add new pieces to the collection, and French designer Léonard Kadid debuts his first.
Geckeler Michels, the Berlin studio behind KNS’s Panorama series, adds a Chair Pad and a Barstool. Across both pieces, the top edge — the chair’s backrest, the stool’s seat — sits level with a standard tabletop. The Panorama Chair’s seat and back are bent from plywood thin enough to look almost like folded paper; the Barstool’s seat curves downward at the back, an ergonomic detail that offers subtle support to the legs. It comes in two heights, and the Chair Pad in an upholstered version with a cushion matched to the wood tone.
The studio’s other addition, a one-seat version of the Fence sofa, works from a different reference: industrial pallets. An oak frame wraps around a padded seat and walls set on an elastic core, built high enough at the back to offer privacy for one person working alone. A run of these seats can also stand in for a wall, dividing a larger space without adding one to it.
BIG-GAME, the Lausanne studio founded by Grégoire Jeanmonod, Elric Petit, and Augustin Scott de Martinville, contributes G-WOC, the brand’s first task chair built entirely in wood. The design started as a collaboration with the Swiss office-furniture brand Giroflex and was reworked by Karimoku for the collection: a plywood shell moulded into shape and faced in oak veneer, set on a frame with tilt and height adjustment and an ergonomically shaped backrest. An upholstered pad is available for the seat.
Léonard Kadid, who is based in Athens, brings his first collection for KNS: Piraeus, named for the city’s working port and inspired by its heavy-duty cranes. The Piraeus Chair carries that into a cantilever frame in solid oak, a construction pushed past what the wood typically handles. It stacks three units high, and launches alongside a new color made just for it, a pale tone KNS calls Powder Blue.
The companion Piraeus Table sticks to the same material and a similarly spare frame — solid oak, sized anywhere from 1200 to 3000mm wide and 700 to 1200mm deep, with an optional channel routed through for cables, suited to desk work and meetings as much as dinner. Beyond his studio work, Kadid teaches at the École d’Architecture de Normandie in Rouen, and in 2022, a piece of his entered the permanent collection of the Mobilier National.
Running alongside the new pieces is a reorganized finish system: three tones — Pure Oak, Grain Gray, Grain Matte Black — make up Standard Colors, and six more make up Signature Colors, priced about 5% above Standard and unavailable on certain pieces like tables. Powder Blue, introduced for the Piraeus Chair, sits in that second group — a color that started as one chair’s launch shade and now belongs to the whole collection.
