Re-issuing the masters

To re-issue a design is to take a position: that an idea from 1965 or 1967 can still be the best answer to a question. Karakter, founded in Copenhagen in 2014, takes that position carefully.

The care is the whole business. Anyone can put an old shape back into production; the difficulty — and the value — is in doing it faithfully enough that the object is the design and not a memory of it.

The original drawings, the right materials

Each re-issue is made with the original drawings and the right materials — solid ash, mouth-blown glass, powder-coated aluminium — so that a Joe Colombo chair or an Angelo Mangiarotti lamp arrives as its designer intended.

The best new furniture is sometimes sixty years old.

Those material choices are not incidental. Mouth-blown glass carries a life a machine-pressed substitute cannot; solid ash ages where veneer merely wears. Getting them right is what separates a re-issue from a replica.

Old and new, side by side

Placed beside contemporary commissions, these pieces remind us that good design does not expire; it waits to be made well again. Karakter deliberately shows the two together, so the old work reads as current rather than historical.

The effect is quietly persuasive: a 1960s Colombo chair next to a new piece looks like a peer, not an ancestor — which is exactly the argument for reissuing it at all.

Buying the intention

What a Karakter piece offers a buyer is the designer's intention, recovered intact — the proportions, the materials and the details as drawn, not as approximated.

It is a small act of preservation you get to live with: keeping a good idea in production, and in use, rather than letting it lapse into a photograph.