Korowai Boardroom Table Named as a Finalist in the 2026 Best Design Awards
We’re delighted to share that the Korowai Boardroom Table has been named a Finalist in the 2026 Best Design Awards, in the Industrial Design — Furniture category.
Designed and crafted by Tréology for Fisher & Paykel, Korowai sits within the boardroom of Fisher & Paykel’s beautifully considered global headquarters, designed by RTA Studio. The architecture provided an exceptional setting for a piece conceived not simply as furniture, but as an integral part of how the space brings people together.
The recognition from the Best Design Awards celebrates a project that brought together contemporary design thinking, traditional timber craft, precision engineering and integrated technology, while maintaining an intentionally quiet and resolved presence in the room.
Rethinking the boardroom
The starting point for Korowai was not simply to design a larger or more impressive boardroom table.
The opportunity was to reconsider how the boardroom itself could support the way Fisher & Paykel’s leadership team meets, communicates and makes decisions.
The table needed to provide a special gathering place for fourteen leaders physically present in the room, while enabling others to participate seamlessly from locations around the world. It needed to perform equally well during strategic discussions, presentations and video conferences, without allowing the technology required to support those functions to dominate the experience.
It also needed to reflect qualities central to Fisher & Paykel: the courage to challenge conventional thinking, functional beauty, collaboration and sustainability.
That led us to question one of the most familiar conventions of boardroom furniture — the rectangular table and the hierarchy it inherently creates.
A table without a head
Korowai takes its conceptual direction from the korowai, abstracted as a cloak-like form that gathers people around leadership.
Instead of a traditional rectangular boardroom configuration, Korowai uses circular geometry. There is no head of the table and no single dominant position. Every participant has equal visual presence.
The tabletop is formed from fourteen individual sections, representing the fourteen leaders who gather around it. Each person has a defined place, but every section is oriented toward the same central focal point.
This circularity is symbolic, but it is also highly functional.
It encourages open discussion and clear sightlines between participants. It supports an unobstructed relationship with presentation screens and video conferencing. Most importantly, it changes the spatial dynamic of the boardroom.
The table shifts the room from a place of position to a place of shared attention.
Ancient material, contemporary purpose
Measuring approximately 5500mm by 4200mm, Korowai is large in scale while intentionally calm in expression.
Its fourteen hand-matched tabletop sections were milled from a single recovered ancient swamp kauri tree, sourced from the same regional landscape as Fisher & Paykel’s headquarters.
That provenance was important.
Ancient swamp kauri carries an extraordinary sense of time and place. Rather than treating it simply as a rare decorative material, we wanted its use to be deliberate, enduring and appropriate to its significance.
Solid timber was selected instead of veneer so the tabletop can be maintained, repaired and resurfaced through its lifetime. It is an approach to longevity that treats sustainability not as an applied feature, but as something embedded in the way the object is made and expected to endure.
A discreet GPS tag concealed within the cupboard door records the original recovery site of the kauri, preserving a traceable connection between the finished table and the place from which its material came.
Making complexity disappear
One of the defining qualities of Korowai is that much of its complexity cannot be seen.
The generous timber overhang is supported by a concealed 6mm steel plate, allowing the kauri edge to taper to a refined 20mm profile. The result gives a table of considerable physical scale an unexpected visual lightness without compromising its structural performance.
The same thinking informed the integration of technology.
Premium AV systems, Q-SYS hardware, ZETR USB-C power, ventilation and cable routes are contained within the base. There are no visible cable trays, plugs or technology penetrations interrupting the tabletop.
Floor-hardwired services, hinged access doors, rebated finger pulls and a discreet end cupboard allow the systems to be maintained and future cabling to be introduced as technology changes.
For us, this is an important aspect of functional beauty: not eliminating complexity, but resolving it so completely that the user does not need to experience it.
The technology serves the table. The table serves the people around it.
Designed for a long life
Korowai brings together recovered native timber and steel in a deliberately restrained material palette.
Both are used with structural honesty and with longevity in mind. Components can be accessed. The timber can be refinished. Technology can evolve. The object has been designed not only for how it performs today, but for how it can continue to perform well into the future. That philosophy feels particularly appropriate for ancient kauri.
A material that has already existed across an immense span of time now has a new purpose: supporting conversations, collaboration and decisions that will help shape what comes next.
Recognition for an idea of gathering
Being named a Finalist in the 2026 Best Design Awards is a meaningful recognition of the many layers that came together in Korowai.
We’re grateful to Fisher & Paykel for the trust to explore an unconventional response to the boardroom, and to everyone whose expertise contributed to its realisation.
Pou Auaha / Creative Director
Andrew Davies
Ringatoi Matua / Design Directors
Andrew Davies, Melany-Jayne Davies
Ngā Kaimahi / Team Member
Dominic Hawkins
Kaitautoko / Contributors
Mark Elmore, Richard Heath, Xanthe Whiteley, Iuliia Sankova
Korowai is ultimately more than a bespoke piece of furniture. It is an object shaped around the act of gathering, bringing people into equal relation, connecting a global design business back to whenua, and giving an ancient tree an enduring role in collaboration, stewardship and strategic thinking.
Explore the Korowai Boardroom Table on the Best Design Awards website to see the full finalist entry and project imagery.
If you’re considering a bespoke piece that needs to bring together material, craft, technology and a particular way of working, talk to Tréology about what we could create for your space.
Image Credits | Tréology