How a Danish Monkey Became a Jewellery Icon

In 1951, a Danish silversmith presented a small wooden monkey at a children’s furniture exhibition in Copenhagen. Within a month, he had sold 600 of them from his own shop. Seventy-five years later, that monkey sits on shelves, desks, and mantlepieces in homes across the world, and has become one of the most recognisable objects in the history of Scandinavian design - and now, it also hangs around people's necks! This is the story of how it happened.

The Man Behind the Monkey

Kay Bojesen was not, primarily, a toy maker. He was a silversmith of the highest order — trained under Georg Jensen himself, the man the New York Herald Tribune would later describe as the greatest silversmith of the past 300 years. Bojesen spent years studying in Germany and Paris, absorbing the finest craft traditions of Europe, before returning to Copenhagen in 1913 to open his own workshop. He went on to create cutlery, silverware, and jewellery of extraordinary elegance, winning the Grand Prix at the Milan Triennale in 1951 — the same year he introduced the monkey.

The two things seem almost impossible to reconcile: the precision silversmith and the playful wooden animal. But for Bojesen, they were expressions of the same philosophy. He believed that beautiful things should be functional, that design should serve life rather than decorate it, and that there was no hierarchy between an exquisite piece of silver cutlery and a toy that made a child smile.

The Making of an Icon

The monkey was created for a children’s furniture exhibition, which explains the context but does not fully explain the object. Bojesen’s monkey is not a toy in any conventional sense — it is a sculpture, a character, a presence. The proportions are precisely wrong in exactly the right way: the arms are too long, the head slightly too large, the posture somewhere between dignified and ridiculous. It sits, it hangs, it perches. It has a personality that very few designed objects manage to project, and it does so without a single unnecessary element.

The material — teak and limba wood — gives it a warmth that cold materials cannot replicate. The joints move. You can pose it, repose it, give it attitude or repose. That interactivity, subtle as it is, creates a relationship between the object and its owner that static sculptures rarely achieve.

Why It Endured

Many objects have a moment. The Kay Bojesen monkey has had seven decades of them. The reason, most design historians agree, is that it sits in a very particular and very rare category: it is playful without being childish, serious without being solemn, simple without being minimal. It appeals to the part of every adult that still finds genuine pleasure in a well-made thing that does not take itself too seriously.

It also arrived at exactly the right cultural moment. The 1950s in Scandinavia were a period of enormous creative confidence - the decade that gave the world the Egg Chair, the Ant Chair, the designs that would come to define what the world meant when it said Scandinavian design. Bojesen’s monkey was part of that wave, and it carried the same values: honesty of material, clarity of form, and the belief that good design belongs in everyday life rather than behind museum glass.

From the Shelf to the Neck

In jewellery, the Bojesen monkey has found perhaps its most personal expression yet - a pendant faithful to the original design in every detail, made to be worn rather than displayed. At The Jewellery Room, we carry three versions, each one a different answer to the same question of how you want to wear it.

The 14k solid gold version is the most precious of the three - a pendant with genuine weight and presence, made to strict quality requirements and finished to the standard you would expect from a piece in solid gold. It is the kind of object you feel immediately when you hold it: the quality is apparent before you have even looked at it properly.

The 925 sterling silver version offers the same faithful rendering of Bojesen’s iconic form in a material that has its own particular warmth and character. Sterling silver suits the monkey’s personality - there is something about the slightly cooler tone that feels right for a design with this much wit and precision behind it.

The third version splits the difference in the most appealing way: a 925 sterling silver base with 18k gold plating, giving the pendant the warmth and lustre of gold at a more accessible price point. It is, in many ways, the most wearable of the three - the gold tone works across a wide range of chain styles and personal aesthetics, and the quality of the plating means it holds its finish with care.

All three can be worn as a pendant on a necklace, used in earrings, or worn in whatever configuration feels right. That flexibility is very much in the spirit of an object that has always resisted being told exactly what it should be.

The Legacy

Kay Bojesen died in 1958, seven years after introducing the monkey. The objects he left behind have never gone out of production, and the monkey in particular has achieved the rare status of being both a design classic and a genuinely loved object — not admired from a distance, but handled, moved, given as gifts, and passed between generations.

The monkey that sold 600 copies in its first month has now sold millions. And somehow, it still feels like it was made for you specifically — which is the definition of a design icon, and the hardest thing in the world to achieve.