PH Axe Table, natural oak legs, laminated plate, without lamp

About the Item

Inspired by the humble axe handle, Poul Henningsen has utilized this familiar and tactile shape to provide the basis for the legs of the versatile table. This piece of furniture stays true to the fundamental values that drove its designer: it is a table that has multiple functions within its environment – as an occasion table, a table to sit at, a table for display and for meetings, a table for work and always for daily use. The PH Axe Table can take it all with its solid structure and eight legs. The table legs can be delivered in natural oak or black oak. The table plate comes in laminate, black oak or natural oak. As an extra option, the PH Axe Table is available with a removable wood cover in the middle of the table top. Upon removing the wood cover, PH 3 ½ - 2 ½ Table Lamp in a special construction with cable outlet below the frame can be installed and plugged in to the pre-installed cable that is hidden in to one of the table legs. The PH Lamp is available in green, red, yellow and white. The PH Lamp adds functional value and highlights the design of this unique piece of furniture designed by PH in the first half of the 1950s.

Creator:

Poul Henningsen (Designer)

Dimensions:

Height: 28.75 in (73 cm)Diameter: 50.4 in (128 cm)

Style:

Bauhaus (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Laminate,Oak

Place of Origin:

Denmark

Period:

2010-

Date of Manufacture:

2023

Production Type:

New & Custom(Current Production)

Estimated Production Time:

8-9 weeks

Condition:

Seller Location:

Copenhagen, DK

Reference Number:

Seller: PH201 0 703 50011stDibs: LU5455221496152

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Shop All Poul Henningsen

Poul Henningsen

The name Poul Henningsen is synonymous with the best and most innovative modern Scandinavian lamps and other lighting. The Danish designer created a signature vocabulary of fixtures with tiered and layered shades in sculptural arrangements that are at once naturalistic and geometric.

Henningsen grew up in a town on the outskirts of Copenhagen and studied architecture at the Technical University of Denmark. He would become a noted art critic, journalist and screenwriter, but his first love was lighting design.

Henningsen’s childhood home was illuminated by oil lamps. When his family switched to electrified lighting, he was alarmed and repelled by the harsh glare cast by an incandescent bulb, and in his late teens he began conducting quasi-scientific experiments to measure which materials and methods best diffused or reflected light to give it a warm brightness. His work came to the attention of the lighting-fixtures firm Louis Poulsen, which sponsored the development of a prototype lamp. The design won a gold medal at the 1925 Paris Expositions Internationales des Arts Decóratifs et Industriels Modernes — from which the term Art Deco derives. The lamp, whose three-part shade is said to be inspired by the arrangement of a dinner plate atop a soup bowl atop a teacup, became the basis for Henningsen’s most successful design, the PH 4/3 desk lamp.

All told, Henningsen would design some 100 lighting fixtures in his career. Some of his most notable creations are hanging lamps, which include the Septima (1929), a pendant composed of seven graduated frosted-glass layers; the Spiral (1942), made of a single ribbon of enameled aluminum; and the Artichoke lamp (1958), whose 70 glass or metal fins in a staggered and graduated arrangement on a central steel frame resemble those of its namesake. The last is likely Henningsen’s masterwork and an icon of mid-20th-century design. Like all Henningsen lighting designs, it is striking, sculptural and — thanks to his insistence on the primacy of the quality of the light cast — superbly functional.

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