GUBI: where history meets right now

Most design brands look forward. GUBI looks both ways at once. Founded in Copenhagen in 1967 by Gubi and Lisbeth Olsson, the house built its reputation by doing something unfashionable — going back into the 20th century, finding the designers history had mislaid, and putting their work back into production exactly as it was drawn.

It is a counter-intuitive business model: instead of chasing the next thing, GUBI chases the overlooked last thing, and backs its judgement that a mislaid design can matter more than a new one.

A living archive, not a museum

The result is a catalogue that refuses to sit still. Greta M. Grossman's 1947 Gräshoppa lamp shares a room with Pierre Paulin's 1975 Pacha, Paavo Tynell's 1935 'Chinese Hat', and brand-new work by GamFratesi. The connecting idea isn't a style — it's a sensibility: design that was ahead of its time, and somehow still is.

A century of design brilliance, in one ever-evolving collection.

That mix is deliberate. A GUBI room can hold a pre-war Finnish pendant, a 1970s French lounge chair and a contemporary Danish sofa without friction, because each was chosen for the same quality of thinking rather than a shared decade.

Made from the original archives

Rediscovery only counts if the remaking is faithful. GUBI works from original drawings and, where it can, the designers' estates, so a reissued piece arrives in the right proportions and materials — the original article, not a tribute act.

That fidelity is what separates an original GUBI piece from the lookalikes its most famous designs inevitably attract. The silhouette is easy to copy; the specification is not.

Why the house travels

GUBI is one of the most specified houses in hospitality — the Beetle Chair furnishes celebrated restaurants worldwide — and it is made in Europe from original archives. To live with GUBI is to keep a small, working history of the century in the room, and to trust that the house has done the archival work so you don't have to.