Klaus Nienkamper, a pivotal figure in the field of design, died last October, in Gaspé, Que., aged 84.Jim Ross/The Globe and Mail
Snagging the commission to furnish the commissioner-general’s suite in Moshe Safdie’s Habitat complex at Montreal’s Expo 67 was quite a coup for 26-year-old furniture jobber Klaus Nienkamper. He had sailed to Canada from his native Germany in 1960 with only $36 in his pocket, and eked out a living soon after as “right rear vacuum man” at Farb’s Car Wash on Toronto’s King Street West.
As Mr. Nienkamper recalled in his eponymous furniture company’s Festschrift, Nienkamper: 50 Years of Excellence from Design to Delivery, published in 2018, “I did not have a factory. My only asset was a station wagon, and I had everything produced in small shops in and around Toronto.”
Events at the Expo 67 suite proved underwhelming. “Charles de Gaulle was going to stay in the suite, and we had this very long bed made for him, but he made his famous ‘Vive le Québec libre’ speech from the balcony of Montreal City Hall. … He never got to sleep in our bed,” Mr. Nienkamper wrote.
When another dignitary visited the suite, Mr. Nienkamper recalled, protocol prevented her from seeing the furniture he had provided. “The Queen was going to have lunch on our beautiful rosewood table that got completely covered with a white tablecloth.”
As if in recompense, he received Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012 in recognition of his contributions to Canadian culture and design. By then, Mr. Nienkamper and his wife, Beatrix Nienkamper, had ascended to the horsey set, with a farm north of Toronto where they raised Friesian horses and competed in the Canadian Carriage Driving Classic in Caledon, Ont.
Mr. Nienkamper, formerly the face of contemporary Canadian furniture design, died of heart failure last Oct. 28 in Gaspé, Que., aged 84. His death was not widely reported at the time.
A pivotal figure in his field, he was the one journalists would turn to when they sought a quote about furniture design, which he would deliver in his soothing, booming bass voice and courtly manner.
For the feature story titled The Best of the Best of Canada, in the 2017 issue of Canadian Interiors, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the trade magazine’s Best of Canada Awards, this reporter wrote that numerous worthy chairs, lamps, desks and other furnishings had won the Best Product Award, but only one, Nienkamper’s much knocked-off Vox videoconference table, rose to the level of industry game-changer, on a par with Ford’s 1908 Model T revolutionizing the auto industry.
Mr. Nienkamper’s Vox videoconference table was an industry game-changer.Supplied
In 1997, Nienkamper created its own market niche: wood conference tables that unobtrusively accommodate wire cabling. Vox tables came pre-wired and arrived ready to plug in and use. As Mr. Nienkamper said in an interview, Mark Muller, Nienkamper’s in-house designer, “created a very elegant solution to access power, voice and data, right on the top. And the base is designed to conceal the wires. Vox is disruptive. It’s something that gets delivered and you just plug it in, basically. You don’t have to call in the Bell telephone and electrician and all those things you normally do.”
Yet this assessment understates Vox’s impact. In an interview, Mr. Muller gave context for why Vox was an overnight phenomenon, obliging the company, which had recently emerged from receivership after expanding too quickly during a recession, to enlarge its factory, located in Scarborough, to keep up with orders for Vox.
“This was when people were getting laptops and of course early-laptop batteries weren’t great so you had to plug them in all the time. This was before anybody even thought about having power at a conference table; it didn’t exist anywhere. No one was doing it.”
“Plus, we put together the best customer service in the world,” Kurt Hanson, Nienkamper’s vice-president of sales from 1975 to 1994, said in an interview. “We decided that we were in the business of making designers look good to their customers.”
Mr. Muller credits Mr. Hanson with Vox’s design brief. “Kurt was the man on the road, connected to sales reps and architecture firms in every big city. He saw the broad strokes of what the market needed right then. He had a client, an energy company in Texas – Enron, I think. ‘Look there’s this opportunity,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to build a boardroom table and somehow get power built into the thing. Can we do this?’ And I took up the challenge: It wasn’t just a table with a power module, it was a system. And that was the beginning of Nienkamper’s transformation.”
Aside from its svelte lines and unprecedented tech-integration, Vox boasted the tactile appeal, unusual if not unique at the time, of seamless veneer wrapping the tabletop and edges. Indeed, Nienkamper holds a patent on the process, which eliminated the traditional Licorice Allsorts banding of veneer over substrate: With Vox, it’s one continuous piece.
Under previous design director Thomas Lamb, Nienkamper’s house style was characterized by thick, heavy-looking leather-wrapped pieces such as the Ambassador series. “It had its clientele,” Mr. Muller said, “like the big gold-mining companies and government offices and embassies.”
Nothing made an Art-Nouveau-meets-Zap-Comix statement like Mr. Lamb’s opulent Sculpted chair, which Nienkamper launched to break into the American market. Unfortunately, Mr. Nienkamper said in a 2013 interview, “Prices for chairs came down considerably and it was a chair that companies didn’t accept at that price level. It was very difficult to make. We had to sell it for $1,200 in the 1980s [equivalent to $5,030, or US$3,588, today].” This spurred a change in market niche. “We were the highest of the high end, but we are now the high end of the middle.”
In an interview, Mr. Hanson recalled that many high-end companies were going out of business at the time. “Klaus had a dictum: ‘Don’t design it if you can’t build it,’ implying, at a reasonable price point. Vox epitomized the company’s transition from handmade to machine-made. “Vox was a manufactured table and it looked like it had been manufactured. We did a lot of craft in the early days and Vox was not crafted. That was a big changeover.”
Under the influence of Mr. Muller, who had grown up in a home with Scandinavian fittings, Nienkamper’s furniture grew lighter and slimmer. His product debut, the Parabola office furniture system, he said, featured “a thin top and was very efficiently designed, which was absolutely not what Nienkamper had been doing. With those big law and accounting firms we were always trying to get, we were suddenly in business.”
Merril Mascarenhas, managing director at Arcus Group, based in Picton, Ont., was a marketing consultant at Nienkamper. In an interview, he recalled a design review “when a junior designer hesitantly presented a bold idea inspired by Scandinavian minimalism. Many in the room dismissed it as ‘too different,’ but Klaus leaned in, asked thoughtful questions and ultimately championed it. He had a deep, almost instinctive grasp of what would endure – never chasing trends yet always open to innovation. That openness not only shaped the company’s portfolio but also gave his team the confidence to take creative risks.”
Klaus Heinz Nienkamper was born on July 22, 1940, in Duisburg, Germany, where his mother, Otty, owned an antique store. During an interview at Nienkamper’s golden jubilee party in 2018, his sister, Doris Hogenkamp, explained that their mother’s antique store sparked young Klaus’s interest in furniture. Following stints at Knoll International in Dusseldorf, household-appliance maker Asko in Sweden and designer Tapio Wirkkala’s studio in Finland, he sailed to Canada. Returning to Germany in 1965 to attend Doris’s wedding, the groom’s sister, Beatrix Hogenkamp, caught his eye.
She followed him back to Canada where they married and in 1968 co-founded Nienkamper and opened their downtown Toronto showroom, a three-storey red-brick Georgian-style house built in 1845 at the northwest corner of King and Berkeley Streets, with stone lintels, massive chimneys and the Nienkamper wordmark supergraphic marching across the front and diagonally up the side. Like so much else about Nienkamper, it was precedent-setting: A lonely outpost introducing contemporary European designs to Canadians in a then-grimy part of town. It spurred gentrification and was the magnet for today’s King East Design District, attracting upmarket firms such as Italinteriors and UpCountry. “There are more efficient places to show furniture, but that building is so much a part of our image,” Mr. Nienkamper said in an interview.
The showroom was the lively hub of Toronto’s architecture and design scene. Part of the charm of Nienkamper showroom parties was the lure of mingling with Klaus; Beatrix, who headed Nienkamper Accessories; and their children, Ottilie, Rebecca and Klaus II, who also worked in the family business.
Their glamorous good looks made them the design industry’s very own Kennedy clan. Klaus leaves them and his grandchildren: Hannah, Marston, Kiefer, Everett, Ava, Otto and Oliver.
Then there was the lure of schmoozing with celebrity guests such as Arthur Erickson (the best architect in North America, according to superstar American architect Philip Johnson), Dutch lighting designer Marcel Wanders and beaming winners of the many Nienkamper-sponsored student furniture-design competitions.
“We had a big responsibility because we were always looked at as bigger than we were,” Mr. Nienkamper said in an interview. “We always wanted to do the right thing. We weren’t too concerned about ending up with a profit on the balance sheet.”
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