In Conversation: Studio Brun
By Mei Tanaka · 9 min read
The Copenhagen practice on treating a cat tree as a small building, and why restraint is the hardest brief of all.
There is a particular discipline in designing for a creature that cannot tell you what it wants. The cat does not read the brief. It does not care for provenance, or material honesty, or the careful negotiation between a piece and the room it occupies. It cares for height, for warmth, for the precise angle of afternoon light. And yet — or perhaps because of this — the best objects made for cats are among the most rigorous in all of furniture design.
Consider the problem of the perch. A cat seeks elevation, but not exposure; it wants to survey without being surveyed. The solution is architectural before it is decorative: a question of sightlines and structure, of where weight is carried and how ascent is invited. Solve it honestly and the form follows. Decorate it first and you have made a prop.
This is the principle our ateliers return to again and again. Begin with behaviour. Let the material answer the function. Trust that restraint, properly applied, reads as luxury — not because it is expensive, but because it is resolved.
“Begin with behaviour. Let the material answer the function.”