KILO
KILO - MorningCalM May 2019
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Dutch brand KILO creates minimalist wood furniture that uses no screws or glue — only joinery that fits together with ultra precision. Sturdy yet mobile, KILO’s furnishings allow you to turn any house in the world into a home.
All across the world, people are on the move. In 2017, about 258 million people were living in a country they weren’t born in, and the number is only growing. Peter Smit began life in the Netherlands, but he didn’t stay there once he reached adulthood. “During my university years, I lived in Costa Rica for a while,” he says. “Then after I got my first job, I moved to Toronto for two years. Then I moved to Los Angeles for two and a half, then to New York for a couple of years.” He’s back in the Netherlands today, but who knows where or when his next country will be?
After so much moving, Smit and architect Jan Paul Koning began dreaming of better furniture for the globe- trotting age. They founded KILO to create products with real mobility and real quality, in contrast to the cheap flimsiness of most flat-pack furniture. Koning had been working at Schmidt Hammer Lassen, the Danish architecture firm that designed the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and Smit had been working in the fashion industry. In 2017, they anchored KILO to a retail store in Amsterdam’s historic Jordaan district.
All of KILO’s tables, shelves, drawers and stools are made from birch plywood sourced either from Finland or the Baltics and are topped with a layer of colorful high-pressure laminate. The pieces are intended to last not only multiple moves, but multiple generations — the name KILO references the heft often associated with high-quality wood furniture.
KILO debunks the notion that true quality means being handmade. Its furniture is created with the superhuman attention to detail that only modern CNC machines are capable of. None of it requires any nails, screws or glue to assemble; its wooden joinery must fit together so well that the parts might as well be one solid piece. “We work with a hundredth of a millimeter tolerance on the actual CNC culling,” says Smit. “So that’s less than the thickness of a human hair.” That’s selling it short — the average human hair is a bulky tenth of a millimeter thick.
Each design must obey three commandments: use each sheet of plywood as efficiently as possible, be shippable worldwide and need no nails, screws or glue to assemble. These rules inevitably lead to a minimalist style and modest sizes. Outwardly, the kiloCalorie looks like one solid tabletop, but in fact it’s assembled from 30 distinct parts. The low-to-the-ground coffee table is modeled after Japanese kotatsu tables, partly as a tribute to Japanese woodworking, which has long set an example of mastery in the art of tight-fitting wood joinery.
The KILO store was built with an attached workshop where the CNC machine lives. “We can make it for you right there on the spot so you can actually see how it’s made,” Smit says. He gives an example with one of KILO’s stools. If you wanted one in a certain color, it would take about 20 minutes to rout it with the CNC machine and then sand, edge and oil it by hand.
KILO’s furniture is sold by resellers throughout the world, including in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
and the Lo Showroom in Seoul, but the Jordaan shop is the only KILO-owned retail space so far. Smit and Koning have begun thinking of countries in which to open a second location. The new store would only use regional suppliers, fully becoming a part of the local community.
When Smit travels, he enjoys arranging house swaps. He and his family traded houses with a family in Mexico last summer, experiencing the country through a space full of personal furnishings. “We have really good experiences with it,” he says. “You end up in a neighborhood where people actually live.”