Walter Knoll

About

Walter Knoll is a German furniture manufacturer based in Herrenberg, in Baden-Württemberg, that produces chairs and barstools, lounge chairs, sofas and benches, tables, executive desks, storage, beds, carpets and accessories for homes, offices and public spaces. The legal entity is Walter Knoll AG & Co. KG, registered at the Stuttgart commercial register under HRA 240551, with Walter Knoll Management AG (HRB 245255) as its personally liable partner. The company states that it produces in Germany and describes its manufacturing as local, tailored and made-to-order. The company dates its founding to 1865, when Wilhelm Knoll opened a leather business in Stuttgart, and it records that the business later held the title of purveyor to the Württemberg royal court. In 1907 his sons Willy and Walter took over and moved it into seating furniture, introducing what the company records as the first club armchair in Germany. Its own history places the founding of Walter Knoll & Co. GmbH, the firm carrying Walter Knoll's own name, in the years 1925 to 1929, together with the Prodomo models it describes as the first modern upholstered furniture. In 1927 Walter Knoll furnished nine apartments at the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, five of them designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Knoll name is also carried by a separate company in the United States. Walter Knoll's own history records that Walter Knoll's son Hans went to the United States in 1938, at first to sell his father's products, and opened his own business there in 1939. Knoll's company history dates the founding of the Hans G. Knoll Furniture Company in New York to 1938 and describes his father as a furniture maker with a Stuttgart factory. Walter Knoll in Herrenberg and Knoll in the United States are separate companies with a shared family origin. After the Second World War the Vostra armchair, introduced in 1949 and attributed by the company to the Walter Knoll Team, helped it regain international recognition. The Herrenberg premises were extended in 1962, and a contract division for business interiors, covering executive offices, swivel chairs, conference furniture and seating for foyers and lobbies, was established in the 1970s. In 1975 Walter Knoll furnished Berlin's Tegel Airport and, with the architect Meinhard von Gerkan, developed the Berlin Chair for the airport's VIP lounge. In 1985 it took over the company Wilhelm Knoll and continued those products as the Wilhelm Knoll Collection. In 1993 the Benz family, long active in German furniture, bought the company and Markus Benz took over its management. He chairs the management board, on which his daughter Mara Benz has served since 2023 as chief information officer, alongside Werner Maier; Gerhard Bosch chairs the supervisory board. The company describes itself as a family-owned German company to this day, and it marked its 150th year in 2015. Production is concentrated at the Herrenberg headquarters and at a second site in Mötzingen, about ten kilometres away, where a production facility opened in 2001 and a further building for assembly, production and logistics was inaugurated in 2012. Walter Knoll states that its direct suppliers sit within 500 kilometres of the headquarters and that over 75 per cent of the goods and services it purchases come from suppliers in Germany. The collection is developed with outside designers and architects as well as an in-house team. The Vienna studio EOOS, formed by Martin Bergmann, Gernot Bohmann and Harald Gründl, began working with the company in 1997 on the Jason sofa and has since contributed around 100 products, among them the Jaan Living and Tama Living sofas. The collaboration with Norman Foster began in the mid-1990s with seating for the lobby of the rebuilt Reichstag in Berlin and continued in the Foster 500, 501, 502, 503 and 620 series. The FK bucket seat by the Danish designers Preben Fabricius (1931-1984) and Jørgen Kastholm (1931-2007), who founded their studio in 1961, stays in the range as the FK Chair and FK Lounge Chair; the company notes that it was the first recipient of the German federal prize for Good Form, in 1969. Others on the company's designer list include Pearson Lloyd, UNStudio and Ben van Berkel, Foster + Partners Industrial Design, Kengo Kuma & Associates, Hadi Teherani, Claudio Bellini, Mauro Lipparini, Toan Nguyen, Dai Sugasawa, Wolfgang C. R. Mezger, Trix and Robert Haussmann, Arno Votteler, Helmut Scheufele and Neptun Ozis. Walter Knoll publishes a set of certificates and standards on its website. It introduced a certified environmental management system in 2019, states that its environmental management follows DIN EN ISO 14001, and offers an ISO 14001:2015 certificate among its downloads. It states that, as a company, it is FSC certified, and it has been a member of the Deutsche Gütegemeinschaft Möbel since 1985; that association's register lists Walter Knoll AG & Co. KG as a holder of the RAL quality mark for furniture product quality, issued to RAL-GZ 430 and known as the Goldenes M, and of the Klimapakt Möbelindustrie label. The company states that all of its carpets carry the STEP label for fair carpet production, that selected pieces bear the German GS safety mark, and that furniture is tested according to its area of application to ANSI/BIFMA X5.1 for office seating and X5.4 for lounge and public seating. It issues material data sheets that contribute to LEED building certification, and it has been a member of the DGNB since 2020 and a supporting member of the BDIA since 2023. Walter Knoll furniture is used in homes, offices and public interiors. It is sold through retail partners, which the company lists in a dealer search on its website, and through its own showrooms, which its site names in Herrenberg, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt, London, Wallisellen, Moscow, New York, Kuala Lumpur and Salisbury South. In North America the company appears as Walter K., and its New York showroom operates as Walter K. Inc. Product data, material overviews and certificate downloads for architects and specifiers are published in the professionals section of its website.