Modern design to create places people love to be

At the intersection of people and environments, there’s Knoll. Founded in 1938, the company’s creative collaborations with the most influential architects and designers of the day have yielded an unmatched portfolio of timeless products for the office, hospitality and home. Knoll was built on its belief that when furniture, interiors and architecture are designed harmoniously, we create spaces where people want to be.

Knoll is a company built on its belief that when furniture relates to the architectural setting, and the interior is choreographed as a harmonious succession of forms and finishes, the result is a cohesive and comprehensive Total Design. With an unmatched portfolio of timeless products by influential architects and designers, Knoll revolutionizes the way in which office, hospitality, and commercial interiors are experienced.

Knoll is a company that thinks differently about space. This began when Hans Knoll hired architect Florence Schust to work at the furniture company he’d founded in 1938. With Florence’s design skills and Hans’ business acumen and salesmanship, the pair, who married in 1946, built an innovative business by embracing the creative ideals of the Bauhaus and Cranbrook Academy of Art.

As the founder and head of the revolutionary Knoll Planning Unit, Florence Knoll introduced modern notions of efficiency, space planning, and comprehensive design to interiors, and defined the standard for the modern office. Her philosophy, that design should consider an entire space, remains true to Knoll today.

The Bauhaus—founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius—sought to unite the creative efforts of art, design, and industry until they became “inseparable components of a new architecture.” In the 1930s, Gropius and Bauhaus designers Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe arrived in the United States.

They arrived just as Florence Knoll (then Schust) was completing her studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she befriended Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero, Harry Bertoia, Ralph Rapson, Charles Eames, and Ray Kaiser (later, Ray Eames). She then studied architecture with Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and interned in the office of Gropius and Breuer. All three became valuable mentors and instilled in her a lifelong belief in the principle of Total Design—design not as the creation of single objects, but rather as a “total architecture.”