Less than a mile from the Hudson River, an imposing industrial complex in Jersey City, New Jersey, hides a collection of antique Danish furniture. Inside, I was greeted by a sign, mounted in a quintessentially industrial glowing pillar. Reading “Lanoba Design,” the words are surrounded by a black outline of a mid-century modern-looking chair and an arrow pointing to the left.
Lanoba Design is the brainchild of Danish entrepreneur Lars Noah Balerskeld and his husband and business partner, David Singh. Every year since 2016, Balderskilde has traveled to Denmark to track down mid-century Danish furniture, comb flea markets, knock on people’s doors, and sweep the streets for discarded furniture. He then packs it into large containers and ships it to the United States, where he and Singh refurbish it and resell it to hungry American customers.
Within five years, Balderskilde managed to salvage more than 10,000 items. If one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, Lanoba Design (Balderskilde’s initials blend) has perfected the art of treasure hunting. But in a world where Americans throw away more than 12 million tons of furniture annually, they’ve also championed circular design by breathing new life into the Danish slopes, keeping themselves cozy (dare I say Hazar) niche in an oversaturated furniture market.
Balderskilde has been working in antique furniture since he was young. “We would never go to an amusement park but to a flea market,” he says, and his brother taught him everything he knew about renovating Danish furniture. But it wasn’t until decades later, when Balderskilde and Singh moved to Chicago and noticed how much Danish furniture was being sold at flea markets, that they realized this might be a business opportunity.
The warehouse in New Jersey is an abundance of rosewood desks for $1095, teak dressers for $995, side tables for $595, tables, chairs, dressers, and countless Danish mid-century modern gems. Some have been renovated and displayed in a showroom complete with Danish hanging lights. Others are stacked in one corner of the warehouse, waiting to be brought back to life.
When I visited the site in December, dusty desks and miscellaneous pieces of furniture were stacked up to three desks high. The depot is open to visitors on the weekends, when people line up to call the first debs on the chops. (During the 2020 closures, offices were flying off the shelves — “We sold 150 in three weeks,” Singh says.)
You can buy a piece as is, or pay about 20% more for a completely refurbished piece that looks like new. Pieces are deeply cleaned, polished and repaired; The joints are tightened and the chairs re-upholstered. Balderskilde says it can take anywhere from three hours to two days to renew an item. For him, it is as much about restoring a piece of furniture as it is about preserving a piece of Danish design history.
In fact, every item in this repository comes with a story. “There are a few pieces I can say: It came from Matilda’s house, she got it as a wedding gift, she’s owned it for 60 years, it’s been sitting in her living room,” Singh says. Despite this, Balderskilde finds most items in basements, attics, or people’s garages. He says Danish homes are now more stylish and modern, and many Danes view these vintage pieces as “old grandma’s furniture” that no longer matches their aesthetic preferences.
Danes may not like their legacies, but they know their value. “Fifteen to twenty years ago, these bits meant nothing to the Danes,” Balderskilde says. “If you had furniture to get rid of, thrift stores rejected it.” For better or for worse, things are changing and demand is growing steadily, primarily from the US but also from Southeast Asia, where Balderskilde says Danish furniture is shipped en masse. As a result, inventory is rapidly dwindling and prices are skyrocketing. “In four to five years, we’ll be at the source end,” Balderskilde says, after which they will have to decide whether to focus on a different era or change course entirely.
Unlike most other Danish furniture pieces in the United States, which date back to the 1970s, Lanoba Design specializes in rosewood and teak pieces manufactured between the late 1940’s and 1960’s. “I like the old stuff a little bit more,” Balderskilde says. With the export boom in the 1970s, he says, Danish furniture was designed to be sent out of the country, so it became mass-produced and lost some attention to detail and quality along the way.
But the American obsession with Danish furniture has been on the rise since then. According to Balderskilde, this is because you get something unique, but also because Danish furniture is compact and multifunctional. It’s designed to fit smaller living quarters like those in Denmark, but also to cities like New York, where most of Lanoba’s customers come from. (They used to ship nationwide but have since scaled back to the three-state area.) Almost every Lanoba dining table comes with an elegant set of leaves that extend to form a larger surface. I also noticed a surprising number of great bookshelves in the right corner of a cozy Manhattan studio. “The idea has always been that people will keep their furniture for 60 years,” Singh says, stressing the importance of utility. “Furniture wasn’t fast.”
In many ways, Lanoba is the antithesis of fast furniture. By breathing new life into pieces of furniture that have already been built, designers are working to reduce the environmental impact associated with building new pieces from scratch. The shipping side of the business may add to a company’s carbon footprint, but most of the pieces we buy today actually travel thousands of miles, mostly from Southeast Asia, so the model will only be beaten by the furniture company that supplies the materials and makes everything in the US” where The saving on the footprint is that we don’t have to reproduce new pieces,” says Balderskilde.