Our story
Furniture should outlast the trend that sold it.
Halden began in 2011 in a rented corner of a boatyard, with one bench and a conviction that most furniture is made to be sold, not lived with. Fourteen years later we still make every piece within sight of the water.
Three principles
Everything we make is tested against three questions.
01
Is the material honest?
Solid oak where it carries load, linen and wool where it touches skin. No veneer pretending to be timber, no foam pretending to be feather.
02
Will it disappear?
Good furniture is quiet. If a piece is the first thing you notice in a room after a year, we got the proportions wrong.
03
Can it be repaired?
Oiled finishes you can renew, covers you can wash, joints you can tighten. We keep spare parts for every piece we have ever sold.
The people
A designer, a joiner, and now twenty-two people who argue about chair legs.
Ingrid Halden trained as an architect and could not find a dining table she would put in her own house. Mats Berg had been building boats for twelve years and knew how to make wood last in weather far worse than a kitchen. They met at the boatyard, and the first table is still in Ingrid’s kitchen.
Today the workshop employs twenty-two people, most of whom learned the trade here. Every one of them has taken a piece home.
“We do not make heirlooms. We make ordinary furniture carefully enough that it becomes one.”
Ingrid Halden, founder
2011
First bench, first table
22
People in the workshop
40
Pieces in the collection
0
Pieces sent to landfill
