Gubi

About

Gubi is a Danish design house founded in 1967 in Copenhagen by Gubi Olsen and his wife Lisbeth Olsen. The company began as a vehicle for producing the couple's own furniture and textile designs, and over subsequent decades it developed into a broader furniture and lighting brand. Gubi remains headquartered in Copenhagen, in the city's Nordhavn district, and operates internationally with distribution across Europe, North America and Asia. Since 2019 the company has been majority-owned by Axcel, a Danish private equity firm, with Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker holding a minority co-investment of around 24 percent and Jacob "Gubi" Olsen, a son of the founders, retaining a significant minority stake. Gubi operates on a dual model that combines two distinct streams of work. The first is the re-edition of overlooked or out-of-production designs from the 20th century, often in collaboration with the estates and rights holders of the original designers. The second is the production of new pieces created with contemporary designers. This approach has shaped a catalogue that spans both furniture and lighting, including seating, tables, storage, mirrors, outdoor pieces and a range of floor, table, wall and pendant lamps. The brand positions itself within the broader field of Danish design and Scandinavian design furniture, with an emphasis on authored pieces produced under licence from named designers. Among its contemporary work, the Beetle chair is one of Gubi's most widely recognised products. Designed by the Copenhagen-based studio GamFratesi and introduced in 2013, the Beetle chair takes its name and curved shell form from the segmented body of a beetle, and it is produced in a range of upholstered and shell variants including dining chairs, lounge chairs and stools. GamFratesi also designed the Stay sofa and seating range for the brand, extending the partnership across multiple product categories. Gubi's re-edition programme accounts for several of its other well-known products. The Bestlite range, originally designed by Robert Dudley Best in 1930 and considered an example of early British modern design, has been produced by Gubi since the company acquired the global rights to the design in 2004. In lighting, the Multi-Lite pendant by Louis Weisdorf, first designed in 1972, features two adjustable domed shades that can be repositioned to direct light. The Semi pendant, created by Claus Bonderup and Torsten Thorup in 1968 from two joined quarter-circle forms, is another Danish lighting design that Gubi reissues. The Gräshoppa floor and table lamps, designed by the Swedish-American designer Greta Magnusson Grossman in 1947, feature a conical shade mounted on a slanted tubular tripod. The brand's seating re-editions include the Pacha lounge chair by the French designer Pierre Paulin. Originally designed in 1975, the Pacha is a low, legless lounge chair, and Gubi reissued the modular Pacha collection in 2018. Across both its historic re-editions and its contemporary collaborations, Gubi works with designers from Denmark and abroad, and it presents the resulting products as design furniture intended for residential and commercial use. Gubi serves several markets. Its products are sold for residential interiors through retailers and the brand's own online store, and they are also specified for hospitality and contract projects such as hotels, restaurants and workplaces. The company's outdoor collections extend several of its furniture and lighting designs to exterior settings. Gubi sells through a network of authorised dealers and design retailers internationally, as well as through its website, and individual pieces frequently appear on the secondary market for vintage and collectible design. As a design house, Gubi combines manufacturing of licensed historic designs with ongoing product development alongside contemporary studios. This combination of archival re-editions and new commissions defines the brand's catalogue of Danish design furniture and lighting, with products such as the Beetle chair and the Bestlite lamp among its most frequently cited pieces.