Peter Zumthor: Furniture as a Fragment of Architecture

Peter Zumthor did not begin with a furniture collection. He began with buildings, and with the things those buildings needed. A table for work, a chaise longue for a thermal bath, a small table for a museum reading room: each object entered the world as part of a particular architectural situation. Time & Style’s Peter Zumthor collection matters because it gathers that private, project-bound body of work without pretending it was conceived as a seasonal product launch.

Fifty years of furniture, reconstructed

Time & Style announced the collection in March 2022 and introduced it internationally at Salone del Mobile that June. The company described it as a selection and reconstitution of furniture accumulated across approximately fifty years of projects by Zumthor and his atelier. That distinction is important. The task was not simply to licence recognisable shapes. It was to understand objects that had already lived inside houses, baths, museums and working rooms, then decide how they could be made consistently without losing their relation to those places.

The first collection grouped five series. The wider range now includes the Valserliege chaise longue, Atelier Zumthor Working Table, Serpentine table and stool, Sheep Chair, Damenhocker, Allmanna stool and Kolumba side table. The variety is revealing: it is closer to an architect’s inventory of necessities than a conventional furniture family.

The table as a working room

The Atelier Zumthor Working Table was used in Zumthor’s private house and studio in Haldenstein. Its apparent simplicity is demanding: a long solid-timber top, four removable legs and no decorative structure to disguise an incorrect proportion. The legs sit in positions that create both stability and a slight visual tension. Time & Style produces it at its Hokkaido factory in beeswax and tannin-black finishes; the darker surface is made through a reaction between iron and the timber’s own tannin rather than an opaque coating.

In Time & Style’s interview with the architect, a discussion of the table’s edge becomes a compact design lesson. Zumthor distinguishes between the hard, abstract edge inherited from certain strains of modernism and an edge that is still precise but kinder to the hand. This is why the collection benefits from a maker with control over milling, drying, machining, hand-finishing and repeated prototyping. The design is carried by millimetres and touch, not by a logo.

Materials are not a finish

Zumthor’s architecture is often discussed through atmosphere, but atmosphere here is not a vague mood applied after construction. It comes from choosing and joining real materials: timber, stone, metal, glass, textile and the marks of use. His furniture follows the same logic. The Valserliege, first developed for Therme Vals, uses steam-bent solid timber made in Akita. Bending the member rather than cutting the curve from a larger block preserves the continuity and strength of the wood while reducing waste. The Kolumba side table is carved from a single zelkova log using a method related to the hollowing of traditional rice mortars.

Why this collaboration fits Time & Style

A manufacturer can reproduce dimensions and still miss the work. Time & Style’s role is closer to interpretation through making. Its own furniture culture values solid material, restrained outlines, repairable construction and the accumulation of small decisions. Those qualities align with Zumthor’s insistence that architecture is physical and that useful things can become companions, passed between people rather than replaced when an image changes.

For Objena, this is the reason to present the collection through rooms, process and provenance before price. The Atelier Working Table and Sheep Chair are currently held as private draft records for partner discussion; no Australian appointment, stock position or sale is implied. What can be evaluated now is the strength of the design record: who designed each object, which building or need produced it, how Time & Style remade it and which material decisions must survive specification.