Karakter: Publishing Colombo, Mangiarotti and the Overlooked Masters

Karakter is a Danish design company, based in Copenhagen, that manufactures furniture and lighting by two overlapping groups of designers: mid-century masters whose work it keeps in continuous or reissued production — Joe Colombo, Angelo Mangiarotti, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni — and contemporary names it commissions new pieces from, including Aldo Bakker. It behaves less like a furniture brand with a single house style and more like a small publisher: a fixed backlist of design history, printed to order, alongside new titles.

A publisher, not a design studio

Most furniture houses sell one point of view: a studio's aesthetic, repeated across a range. Karakter sells a roster instead. Its designer list runs from Bodil Kjær and Paul McCobb through the Castiglioni brothers to Colombo and Mangiarotti — historical figures who mostly never worked together, whose pieces were designed decades and sometimes a continent apart, now sharing a single European production standard and a single catalogue. The unifying claim isn't a look; it's a stated commitment to "an uncompromising attitude to quality" and to keeping work that would otherwise sit out of production back on the market, made properly, in Europe. It is the same instinct behind Objena's own approach to provenance — that the maker, the year and the material are the argument, not a house silhouette.

Chair 300: Joe Colombo, 1965

Karakter's clearest example is Chair 300. Joe Colombo — an Italian architect who believed furniture should be democratic and functional, "machines for living" built for more than one use — designed it in 1965; an early version went into production with the Italian manufacturer Pozzi the following year. The chair pairs a solid wood frame, in ash or American walnut, with an upholstered seat and back set inside a modest double-slat frame, finished in Kvadrat textile or Sørensen leather over high-resilience foam. It is a small, quiet design: nothing about it announces itself as a 1965 object, which is precisely why it has stayed sellable for sixty years.

The Mangiarotti Collection

Angelo Mangiarotti, born in Milan in 1921, trained as an architect at the Politecnico di Milano and spent 1953–54 teaching in the United States, where he met Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. He returned to Milan, ran an architecture practice with Bruno Morassutti until 1960, and worked across buildings, furniture and lighting until his death in Milan in 2012 — winning Italy's Compasso d'Oro for career achievement in 1994 along the way. Karakter's 2024 Mangiarotti Collection brings four of his glass lights back into production — Sfera, Accelsa, Saffo and Lari — each mouth-blown, including Accelsa, a Venetian frosted-glass table lamp Mangiarotti designed in 1985. It is the same publishing logic as Chair 300, applied to light instead of seating: an object drawn decades ago, made again to the original intent.

Why we're watching, not yet listing

Objena's active catalogue currently runs through Emeco, Form & Refine and FRAMA, and Karakter isn't one of them. We write about houses ahead of stocking them; it's how the outreach list gets built, and how a reader searching for a house we don't carry yet still gets an honest answer instead of nothing. Nothing on this page is a claim that Objena distributes, imports or is authorised to sell Karakter — we aren't, and won't say so until a supply agreement actually exists. If you want a Copenhagen studio with the same steel-and-brass honesty, FRAMA's Triangolo Chair and T-Lamp are catalogued at Objena ahead of release; the full house story is in the FRAMA chapter.

For the wider case on why Objena names the designer, the year and the maker on every piece it lists — including houses like this one it doesn't sell yet — see reissue vs replica.

Three questions

What is Karakter Copenhagen? Karakter is a Danish design company that manufactures furniture, lighting and objects in Europe. It publishes two groups of work side by side — pieces by mid-century masters including Joe Colombo, Angelo Mangiarotti and Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, kept in continuous or reissued production, and new commissions from contemporary designers such as Aldo Bakker. It is rooted in Danish design tradition but sources its historical roster mostly from Italy.

What furniture does Karakter reissue from Joe Colombo? Karakter's best-known Colombo reissue is Chair 300, designed by the Italian architect-designer in 1965 (an early version was also produced by Pozzi in 1966). It pairs a solid wood frame — ash or American walnut — with an upholstered seat and back set inside double horizontal slats, upholstered in Kvadrat textile or Sørensen leather over HR foam. Colombo designed it around his belief in democratic, functional furniture meant to work in more than one setting.

Is Karakter furniture available at Objena? Not yet. Objena's active catalogue currently runs through Emeco, Form & Refine and FRAMA; Karakter is not among the houses we have a supply agreement with. We write about houses ahead of stocking them — it is how the outreach list gets built, and how a reader searching for a house we don't carry yet still gets an honest answer instead of nothing. If that changes, this article will be updated to say so plainly.