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Powerhouse Company

Two Powerhouse Company architects in black and white, one standing, one seated in a wire-frame Coquille Chair.

Powerhouse Company

Powerhouse Company is an award-winning architecture office based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Founded in 2005, it has grown into a multidisciplinary office of around 100 professionals, with international studios in Beijing, Oslo, and Munich.

Prizes include the Dutch Design Award, the Maaskant Prize and the AM/NAI Award. With a fine collection of architects’ chairs of our own, it was inevitable that Powerhouse Company would produce our own one day. After all, every architect wants to design a chair. Why? Probably because a chair can so perfectly distil the essence of an architect’s style. A chair brings our work to a wider public, and it creates a uniquely intimate relationship with those who use it.

Check out the collection
Coquille Chairs by Lensvelt and Powerhouse Company lined up on a white plinth in purple, blue, white, black, coral, red, green and chrome.

D-chairs at Forum Groningen

Two Coquille Chairs in light and dark blue, wire-frame shells designed with Powerhouse Company

The Coquille Chair

Lensvelt, together with Powerhouse Company, developed an indoor-outdoor chair, called Coquille.

Coquille, like our buildings, is classical yet innovative. It sculpts space using a modernist vocabulary of proportion, scale, and geometry, which it adapts in a fresh and contemporary way. It’s a perfect fusion of form and function, and it has a powerful presence. It is simply elegant. More than just a chair, it’s kind of microcosm of a Powerhouse Company building.

Coquille Chair at a dark bistro table beside a pink banquette in Putaine restaurant & bar, Rotterdam

Coquille chair_ Putaine restaurant & bar, Rotterdam
Nanne de Ru, Hans Lensvelt and Maarten Diederix with blue and purple Coquille Chairs in a timber-framed interior.

Nanne de Ru, Hans Lensvelt (CEO Lensvelt) and Maarten Diederix

A worker in a protective suit and respirator powder-coats Coquille Chair frames hanging in a spray booth.

The making of Coquille

Ingredients for collaboration

As a respected furniture label, Lensvelt provides both architects and interior designers with the right tools to create the best possible interiors. Together, we designed a chair that can be used inside as well as outdoors. Coquille Chair is solid, durable, comfortable, and well-designed, which to us is sober, functional, and logical.
Chrome Coquille Chair with a brown leather seat pad on a deep red plinth, beside the Coquille by Powerhouse panel.
Two chrome Coquille Chairs with pink seat pads on pink plinths, beside a round table and an Alvar Aalto poster.
The Coquille Chair in white on a turquoise plinth, against a panel reading Coquille by Powerhouse Company.

...resulting in unique images that emphasize their stateliness and charm.

The Coquille Chair in violet on a turquoise plinth, against a panel reading Coquille by Powerhouse Company.
The Coquille Chair in red on a turquoise plinth, against a panel reading Coquille by Powerhouse Company.
The Coquille Chair in mint green on a turquoise plinth, against a panel reading Coquille by Powerhouse Company.