Cloud Circu

Circu has made a name for itself as the premier maker of luxury children’s furniture. It was founded on a dream of creating a magical world for children where they could live their fantasies. The company is owned by the Covet Group and was established in 2014 in Portugal.

Each piece that Circu creates is unique, with its own individual character and charm. Boasting bright pastels and bold primary colors, the company’s imaginative handmade stools, bookcases, storage cabinets and beds are produced with carefully selected materials by Portuguese artisans — a team of expert carpenters, weavers and designers. Each furnishing is made with great care — Circu products are fine-tuned to cater to the curious and adventurous spirits of children, and some pieces take up to 12 weeks to complete. 

Circu’s designs typically draw on familiar forms — while the shapes and structures are sometimes unconventional, each piece is inspiring and adds a charming touch to any space. There are beds that replicate train cars and balloon gondolas, bookcases made to look like big, red rockets and dressers created to appear as unevenly stacked individual drawer casings. Crafted in acrylic, aluminum and stainless steel, Circu’s line of Graphic floor lamps created in partnership with DelightFULL Unique Lamps brings blocky oversize letters of the alphabet into a child’s bedroom for a clever lighting alternative. The company offers chairs adorned with fairy wings and bunny ears, as well as desks in playful shapes, such as airplanes and clouds. 

Headquartered in Porto and Rio Tinto, Portugal, the brand also has locations in Saint-Ouen, a northern suburb of Paris, and in New York City. Circu has exhibited its covetable furnishings at Salone del Mobile Milano.

Find Circu lighting and other furniture on 1stDibs.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.