An engineer from an architecture office, a marketer and an IKEA kitchen.

Reform is a Danish kitchen company founded in Copenhagen in 2014. The Copenhagen Post, in a report by Anna Clarke dated 1 April 2016, gave the founding as October 2014 and named the founders as Jeppe Christensen and Michael Andersen. The company’s own About page today says simply that Reform was “born in Copenhagen in 2014.”

The two founders came from different directions. A profile published by the publisher Gestalten in August 2019 described Andersen as an engineer who had previously worked at BIG, the architecture office of Bjarke Ingels, and Christensen as the holder of a master’s degree in marketing and economics who had been a partner in a carpentry and design business. Gestalten said their aim was to make good design accessible, in a market where the established players served mainly luxury clients.

The model was built on an existing product. Reform does not make the cabinet boxes of its kitchens. As The Copenhagen Post explained in 2016, customers buy their kitchen cabinets from IKEA and then fit Reform’s fronts and countertops, which click into place on the IKEA structure. The newspaper reported the company’s description of this as turning an IKEA kitchen into a piece of design furniture at a lower price than a fully custom one, and quoted Christensen saying that the kitchen is often overlooked in home design and that the company wanted everyone to have access to good design.

That idea was summed up in a line the founders gave Dwell in August 2017: “We are here to challenge the traditional kitchen industry.” From the start, the challenge was made through named designers rather than through anonymous in-house styles, and the founders’ first move was to approach architecture offices in their own city.

Three architecture offices, a mint-green first design and a growing list of collaborators.

Reform’s first architect collaborations were reported in August 2015. Design Milk, in an article by Caroline Williamson dated 26 August 2015, described three kitchens designed for Reform by Danish offices. BIG used handles made from seat-belt material, a material not usually found in a kitchen, with fronts in white or oak and a composite countertop and sink. Henning Larsen Architects drew on classic Scandinavian kitchens, in an oak-veneer edition with a copper band or a white or black spray-painted edition with a steel band in the same colour. Norm Architects made a handleless design with a dark, minimal look, offered in fibre-concrete, bronzed tombac, sawn oak and smoked oak.

Reform also has a design of its own. Gestalten described BASIS as the company’s first design, with a round handle inspired by Scandinavian kitchens of the 1960s, and Dwell showed it in 2017 with mint-green fronts, wood handles and a wooden countertop. Dwell also described a kitchen by the architect Sigurd Larsen, built from anthracite aluminium that was cut, folded and assembled into layers.

The list of designers kept growing. Gestalten named collaborations with Muller Van Severen, Note Design Studio and Studio David Thulstrup, a design called SURFACE with Norm Architects using sawn oak fronts and black coated steel handles, and a kitchen called Up, made with the Lendager Group from off-cuts of Dinesen flooring. The company’s About page now lists collections made with David Chipperfield, Norm Architects, Jean Nouvel, Muller Van Severen, Inga Sempé and Cecilie Manz, and says its products are “made to order in Northern Europe.”

The company soon looked abroad. The Copenhagen Post reported in 2016 that Reform was opening a New York office and planning one in Berlin. Gestalten dated the Copenhagen showroom to 2016, New York to 2017 and a Berlin Mitte showroom to 2019. As of October 2026, Reform’s showroom page lists Copenhagen; DUMBO in Brooklyn, Downtown Los Angeles, Costa Mesa, Philadelphia and Paramus in the United States, plus spaces inside Design Within Reach stores in San Francisco, Manhattan and Chicago; and Munich and Berlin in Germany.

Design and documentation.

Kitchen cabinet and kitchen-system brands sit at many different points in the trade, from workshops that build a single kitchen to order to factories that make modular systems sold through showrooms in many countries, and from firms that make the whole room to companies that make only the doors and fronts that fit another maker’s cabinet frames.

A kitchen brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a way of planning a room: a grid, a handle, a finish, a run of named colours, a showroom and the designers whose names are attached to it. Because the company behind a name may have changed hands, moved its workshop or begun buying in parts, the plain questions are worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its cabinets are actually built.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its kitchens are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A kitchen brand that credits its designers.

Reform’s identity rests on authorship. Where most kitchen companies present a range under their own name, Reform presents its kitchens through the people who drew them: the press coverage of its 2015 launch was framed around BIG, Henning Larsen Architects and Norm Architects, and the company’s About page today leads with a list of architects and designers rather than with product names. Each design is identified by a detail that is easy to recognise, such as the seat-belt handles of the BIG kitchen, the metal band of the Henning Larsen kitchen or the handleless fronts of the Norm design.

Materials carry much of the rest. The descriptions in Design Milk, Dwell and Gestalten return again and again to oak, whether sawn, smoked or veneered, to metals such as copper, steel, bronzed tombac and aluminium, and to fibre-concrete and linoleum. The company’s own pages describe natural materials chosen for how they look, feel and age. Colour, when it appears, tends to be specific and memorable, as with the mint-green BASIS fronts shown by Dwell in 2017.

The showroom network is part of the presentation as well. Reform places kitchens in its own showrooms in Copenhagen, Germany and the United States and inside Design Within Reach stores, so that its fronts are seen next to furniture and lighting rather than in a kitchen-trade setting. The IKEA base underneath stays the same; what changes from one showroom kitchen to the next is the surface and the name attached to it.

For a design guide, Reform shows how a company can turn a standard component into a platform for named designers, using materials and a single recognisable detail per design to tell its kitchens apart. Compare it with the IKEA brand guidelines, whose cabinet bases sit beneath every Reform kitchen, and with Semihandmade, a California maker of fronts for the same boxes. For this guide we use fjord green, mint, oak and dark tombac with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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