Sturdy, comfortable and 100% circular, without the usual office-chair look.

Most office chairs are designed to disappear. TANK Interior Design Agency wanted the opposite: a chair that stands out, but not in a flashy way. The result is the Tank Chair, previewed at the Lensvelt gallery in Amsterdam.

Underneath the calm look sits a serious chair: NEN 1335 certified, adjustable backrest, armrests and seat, built to last. It is produced entirely in Europe, uses plastic only where there is no alternative, and is 100% circular at the end of its life.

The epoxy frame and the upholstery can be customised from five pieces. One of the first places to put it to work: the Adyen office in Amsterdam, with cream Tank Chairs in the brick-walled work bays.

Two Milano Design Awards in a row, for a grey office and a chair that asked for attention.

In 2016 the Milano Design Award for Best Concept, the 'Oscar of the interior world', went to the Boring Collection: grey desks, chairs and cabinets, presented with Space Encounters in a room flooded with crumpled paper, with a campaign by Lernert & Sander. The jury picked it out of 1,600 exhibitors. Their verdict: 'not particularly striking'. Exactly.

In 2017 Lensvelt won again, for the launch of Maarten Baas' 101 Chair under the title May I Have Your Attention Please? No other company had taken the award twice in a row.

A farmhouse just across the Belgian border, furnished with Lensvelt pieces and the designers behind them.

The Lensvelt Farmhouse in Meer, renovated by architect Eline Strijkers, is where the collection comes home. A long orange kitchen unit by Atelier van Lieshout runs through the glazed brick interior. Under the glass roof, an AVL SPR Cathedra lounger and pouf keep an Atelier van Lieshout sculpture company. In the library, Fabio Novembre's New Balance sofa and armchair, red and yellow, bring the playfulness. Outside, the orange AVL Cloudtable and Glyders sit by the pond, and two Cane Divans by Simo Heikkilä wait on the lawn. Big dinners happen at the AVL Shaker table, on Shaker chairs in red and natural wood.

It started with one bent steel tube. Then came a sofa, and a chair that is two thirds of a chair.

The collaboration with Studio Stefan Scholten began with the Loop Chair: a single steel tube that runs from the armrest through the seat and into the legs. Stackable, linkable, light, and happy outdoors as well as in. Made from 100% reusable steel, in black, oyster, copper and olive.

Then came Bold: a compact sofa system of four elements with soft, rounded forms and a slightly asymmetrical shape, so it looks interesting from every side. Double seams accentuate the curves; a black steel frame keeps it grounded.

And the 2THRD Chair, entirely in FSC oak: about two thirds the size of a normal chair, which is exactly what small spaces need. Stackable, light, and at home in houses, offices and restaurants.

Ten years after Gustavino, the PH1 returns: height-adjustable, in a 3D knit by ByBorre.

The PH1 was born about ten years ago, when Ronald Hooft designed it for restaurant Gustavino in Amsterdam: a robust chair in leather, with the seams facing out. Since then it has turned up at Gin Sum Club in Haarlem, the Urban Industrial lounge and OMA's Timmerhuis in The Hague.

The new generation adds a height-adjustment mechanism, operated with a lever under the seat, and a powder-coated steel column. The seat is upholstered in a 3D knit that textile house ByBorre developed for Lensvelt: wool blended with GRS-certified recycled nylon on the outside, recycled polyester on the inside.

Ronald Hooft and Herman Prast form Prast/Hooft, the 'village architects of Amsterdam'. The relaunch was celebrated where it should be: on their rooftop terrace, in summer.

Dinners, atelier visits and the occasional roof party: how a furniture label keeps its friends close.

Some of the best things at Lensvelt happen after hours. A dinner with Stefan Scholten at long tables in the Breda showroom. An atelier visit with Maarten Baas under his neon LESS signs. An evening at Joep van Lieshout's place, with the host in white overalls next to a bronze winged sculpture.

The Tank Chair was introduced on a February evening; the PH1 came back on a rooftop in summer. Masterclasses with OMA, dinners on the Herengracht, welcome dinners during Dutch Design Week.

None of it is strictly necessary. All of it is why designers keep coming back.

Not a pop-up. During Milan Design Week, Lensvelt gave Ristorante Dinky a permanent new interior.

Most things in Milan during design week are gone by Sunday. Dinky Dutch stayed. Together with the owners of Ristorante Dinky on Viale Brianza, Lensvelt redesigned the restaurant for real: concept by Erik Kessels, interior by architect Carlo Alberto Monteverde, a mural and painted ceiling by artist Sjeng Kessels, lighting by Modular.

The furniture: Richard Hutten's THIS Bucket Chair, with a shell of 100% post-consumer plastic; the Coquille swivel chair by Powerhouse Company, spray-painted turquoise; 4000 Series tables; a custom teal banquette. And the Empty Chair, with Kessels' book under the seat, in a nightly performance.

Monteverde kept the lower half of the room minimal and functional, so the painted ceiling could take over. 'Dinky, cut in half,' as Kessels put it.

One colour, three collections, one designer: Studio Stefan Scholten did the furniture and the stand.

At Design District, the best interior fair in the Netherlands, Lensvelt showed the Bold sofa series, the 2THRD chair and the Loop chair, all designed by Studio Stefan Scholten. The stand was his too.

Everything was terracotta: fabrics and curtains by Maharam, linoleum tabletops by Forbo, carpet tiles by Desso/Tarkett. A monochrome room that made the shapes do the talking.

Teun Zwets turned Lensvelt's steel waste into ten jewel-like cabinets for Dutch Design Week.

Normally Teun Zwets starts with an idea and then looks for the right waste. This time the waste came first: residual steel from Lensvelt's own furniture production. Hans Lensvelt, who admired Zwets' work with discarded material, asked him to make something of it.

The result is Le Petit Boudoir: ten modular cabinets, 100% steel, laser-cut, perforated and powder-coated in two colour groups, from sophisticated to bright. They look like jewellery, hence the name. At the Evoluon they stood in giant walk-in jewellery boxes.

The point goes beyond the cabinets. Conventional steel recycling burns gas. This shows that production waste can become high-quality products, at scale, without it.

120 chairs, nine faces, nine colours, and mohair wigs sold separately.

Maarten Baas had admired Walter Van Beirendonck's work since his years at the Design Academy; Van Beirendonck had sold Baas' Clay furniture in his Antwerp store. So when Baas proposed a special edition of his 101 Chair, the Flemish fashion designer said yes.

Characters is a limited edition of 120 chairs: nine characters, each with its own facial expression, in nine colours. Some have embroidered armrests with words like Love and Hold. The soft mohair wigs come separately.

Van Beirendonck unveiled them at a preview dinner in the Lensvelt Gallery on the Herengracht, on a six-metre catwalk he designed himself. His message: diversity, and the value of being different. Objects should have a personality, he says. You might even give yours a name.

A bistro chair rethought in steel, named after a shell, handmade in Italy.

Powerhouse Company builds skyscrapers and museums. Coquille is their chair: a test run for designing bigger things, as designer Maarten Diederix puts it. The starting point was the classic bistro chair in bent wood and rattan; the name refers to Botticelli's Venus, born from a shell.

It is one sculptural piece in tubular steel: a generous back with curving ribs on a swivel base, four legs with a bold curved profile, an upholstered seat in the middle and an openwork pattern under the base. The legs were the hard part. Extreme bending, holes punched and filled again. Lensvelt R&D and the Italian artisans solved it together.

Steel was the point: it works indoors and out, it has been the modernists' material since Marcel Breuer, and it catches the light like water. Fully recyclable, in almost any colour.

A book of 160 empty chairs, and the white chair that came out of it.

One winter evening Erik Kessels walked into the Lensvelt office with a mock-up of a book: A Pictorial History of the Empty Chair, edited with Karel De Mulder. 160 photos of empty chairs, collected at markets around the world, arranged chronologically from the early twentieth century to now. In every photo the chair sits on the right, which turns the sequence into a slow joke. Its theme is absence.

Hans Lensvelt, a close friend, did what friends do: he made the chair. White, stackable, 100% recyclable, with its name cut into the backrest. During GLUE Amsterdam, Kessels turned it into a live performance and an installation at the Lensvelt Gallery.

Kessels and photographer Bert Teunissen then took the chair out into the world: shallow sea water, a pine forest, a meadow with belted cows. One of those photos became the cover of the Lensvelt brochure.

Richard Hutten's seating for Schiphol, made from Schiphol's old seats. Dezeen gave it the Sustainable Design Award.

Blink is a seating system designed by Richard Hutten for Schiphol Airport, developed and produced circularly by Lensvelt. The old Schiphol seats were recycled into the new ones. The aluminium frames are recyclable; the upholstery uses coconut fibre, wool and recycled clothing and can be re-covered when damaged. Table tops are bio-based: natural resin reinforced with natural fibres.

No screws: special fastenings developed with M3 make the seats easy to move and, at the end of their life, easy to take apart. Lensvelt puts Blink's carbon footprint 95% below comparable products.

At Pier E24 it sits in black, with polished triangular armrests and a Richard Hutten plaque. Along the gate windows: green benches with wooden armrests, also by Lensvelt.

Years of working together, celebrated in turquoise during Dutch Design Week 2020.

For Dutch Design Week 2020, Lensvelt and Piet Hein Eek celebrated their long collaboration with a fresh twist: an extension of the Made in the Workshop collection and a relaunch of the Aluminium Series, shown as the installation Past, Present, Future at Eek's own place on the Halvemaanstraat.

Everything in turquoise: an oversized table framing stacked chairs, a riveted table with six matching chairs, a metal table on a white plinth. Two men, one big blue table, and a lot of years between them.

A blue cannon, a room full of crumpled paper, a ceiling of megaphones. Eleven years of Milan, one per year.

2011: Joep van Lieshout's office chairs in brown leather. 2012: Furnication-WWIII, twelve and a half years with Atelier Van Lieshout, celebrated around a blue cannon. 2014: Maarten van Severen in a white daylit gallery, installed by OMA.

2015: the UNM desk in speckled stone and polished copper. 2016: the Boring Collection, thousands of paper wads, and the Milano Design Award. 2017: May I Have Your Attention Please? for Maarten Baas' 101 Chair, under horns and megaphones. A second award.

2018: Nothing New, only used furniture, to make a point about sustainability. 2019: All New, the opposite: Lazy Modernist, Felix, New Balance, and Bar Baas, a pizzeria turned pop-up. 2022: Boring 3.0 at Certosa and the first Dinky Dutch, with Erik Kessels. The restaurant is still there.