With the last 10 years fascination with ‘50s and ‘60s design, Vedel’s melamine series is maybe an obvious opportunity for a new manufacturer to re-launch the series?

As a former student at the Art Academy’s Furniture School under the leadership of Kaare Klint, Vedel was naturally interested in modular and multifunctional principles. The idea about additive principles, modular systems and objects, which can be transformed so they have multiple functions, lay as a point of investigation for many architects and designers in the ‘60s. For Kristian Vedel this finds expression in among others things the children’s furniture and the furniture series “Modus”, which he designed in 1960. The system went into production at Søren Villadsen’s Eftf. in 1963. The Modus range or system consisted of a line of different furniture built over the same frame: high and low backed armchairs, low tables with a glass plate or a large aluminum bowl and later also dining room chairs. The series is manufactured in two types of wood: Brazilian rosewood and teak.

Kristian Vedel designed various kinds of children’s furniture of which one series was put into production with Torben Ørskov & Co. in 1957. The children’s furniture’s parts can be placed together in many ways and through that offer multiple functions. Simply put the furniture consists of a half cylinder in steam bent beech veneer with slots in the sides, where one can place horizontal plates. According to how high you place these plates you get a low or high chair, a table, a dolls cradle or with two plates a safety seat for the family’s youngest. The plates stay simply in place by wedging them in the half cylinder’s slots. Therefore there are no screws or nails on which the small child can scratch himself.