Furniture firm Allsteel launched a new partnership with Danish design brand Fritz Hansen to develop new furnishings for a range of spaces, including hotels. Initial products will include the Let Chair, the Planner Table and Shelving, the Egg and Swan chairs and a variety of Series 7 chair options.
Adam Ames, VP of product & marketing at Allsteel, said the company has added “strong key partners” in recent years, including Zilenzio, Corral USA and Normann Copenhagen. The Fritz Hansen style, he added, “really ties in great with the Allsteel brand and where we're headed ... We're looking at how we make sure we've got coverage, if you will, for our clients in all the key areas.”
A good design partnership, Ames continued, should focus on the client’s end-use of a product. “What do they need? They need brands like Fritz Hansen.” Ames expects historic brands to create spaces that will draw people back to their workplaces. “The workplace looks to hospitality [to] achieve that emotional draw,” he said. “So whether it's a Corral, whether it's a Normann Copenhagen or a Fritz Hansen, all of these partnerships allow you to create very unique curated spaces, these vignettes that have an emotional appeal, yet provide the function needed in a hospitality environment.”
“Through the partnership with Allsteel, Fritz Hansen is excited to expand its distribution in North America,” Henrik Holm Pedersen, VP Americas at Fritz Hansen, said in a statement when the partnership was announced. “In collaboration with Allsteel, we believe the partnership can help realize the ambition of bringing long-lasting, quality furniture that stands the test of time, into the lives of more people and spaces.”
Blurring Lines
Andrea Gauss, senior portfolio strategist for Allsteel, agreed that experiential design can help encourage people to return to their workplaces. “We need to be able to create spaces that do lots of different things,” she said. Hospitality venues and traditional workplaces are evolving in tandem, she added, especially as remote working grows in popularity. Designers are increasingly incorporating coworking elements into hotels, she said. “A business center can't just be a room with a printer anymore.”
A variety of settings in a space can help blur the line between work and hospitality, she added. “It's not one size fits all. Separation between individuals is important, and it can't be all super low and loungy," she said. "I need to have something a little bit more upright, maybe some division built into the product pieces as well.” A Fritz Hansen Egg chair, for example, creates a defined space around the person sitting in it, offering a sense of protection—and contributing to an overall sense of mental and psychological wellness, she said: “People like to sit in spaces that have partitioning around them, and they feel more comfortable to connect and have these conversations.”
Similarly, mobile furniture that can easily adjust to a range of uses will further blur the line between hospitality and office design. Guests will need to have some kind of ownership over the space to make it work for themselves as needed, she said.