When Marie Kristine Schmidt arrived at a showroom in Taipei recently, she had to make a quick detour — she had forgotten to bring socks. She ducked into a nearby mall, bought a pair, and returned just so she could remove her shoes before stepping inside the exhibition space.
It was, she later admitted, a ritual she found genuinely charming. She half-joked that she wanted to photograph everyone from the feet up. It was a small moment, but a telling one: Schmidt, who has led the Danish furniture brand GUBI as CEO since 2021, tends to enter spaces the way she approaches design — not through form first, but through how people actually inhabit them.
A Curator Of Survival, Not Creation
Before GUBI, Schmidt spent years at Bang & Olufsen and Georg Jensen, working at the intersection of sound, objects, and lifestyle. When she took over GUBI, she didn't arrive with a new aesthetic agenda. Instead, she turned to a harder question: which designs are worth keeping?
GUBI has long drawn from the mid-20th-century design canon, rescuing or reimagining works that might otherwise stay dormant. But Schmidt is careful about how she frames that mission. She doesn't call it revival or recreation — she calls it translation.
"History is never about staying in the past," she said. "It's about how we bring it into the present."
That translation, in practice, means editing rather than inventing. Dimensions can be adjusted, proportions reconsidered, and use-contexts redefined for contemporary living — smaller apartments, different habits, new relationships between people and furniture. But one thing remains fixed: the original idea behind a design. Once that core intention is compromised, she said, the piece ceases to hold together. Her role, by her own description, is not to create but to judge: what deserves to continue existing?
Taiwan As A Place That Understands Material Memory
Schmidt spoke about Taiwan not through market data, but through climate and sensibility. The humidity here, she observed, makes people more attuned to how materials feel. The cultural disposition — understated, perceptive — means a design doesn't have to announce itself loudly to be understood.
Those qualities, she believes, align well with what GUBI cares about. "Some designs matter not because they are new," she said, "but because they make you feel closer to yourself."
The sentiment found a concrete expression in the work she brought to Taipei: a collaboration between GUBI and Bonacina 1889, an Italian rattan atelier founded over a century ago. The resulting P3 series preserves the hand-woven structure of the original craft while presenting it within a more open spatial vocabulary — historically grounded, but oriented toward how people actually live now.
Schmidt sees rattan not as a nostalgic material but as a responsive one. After the pandemic, she noted, people began rethinking their relationship to nature and seeking spaces where the body could genuinely rest. Heavily processed materials struggled to meet that need; natural textures did not.
What A Home Accumulates Over Time
When the conversation turned to domestic life, Schmidt's pace slowed. She has collected lighting pieces for more than three decades — not primarily for their illumination, but for their sculptural presence, for the way they alter the atmosphere of a room.
The deeper reason, though, is memory. After her parents died, she kept many objects from her childhood home. Those pieces — furniture and lamps — maintain her connection to the past and extend what "home" means beyond the walls she currently occupies. A home, in her view, is not something that exists when you move in. It grows from the time you spend inside it.
That understanding also shapes how she thinks about sustainability. For Schmidt, the question is less about materials and processes than about longevity — whether an object is worth keeping, worth using for decades, worth carrying into the next chapter of a life.
She ended the conversation on a quietly personal note. Asked what she would want her children to take with them when they eventually leave home, she paused and mentioned a lamp sitting on her daughter's vanity table.
"One day, that lamp will leave this house and appear in another room," she said. "It will be turned on, and it will keep existing."
What matters most to her, she added, is not that her children choose the same things she would. It's that those things become theirs genuinely.
