What does an office furniture company and building a LEGO set have in common? Knolling.

It all started years ago when a janitor at a furniture store, which was designing the furniture brand Knoll, starting laying out the tools he found left out at the end of the day at right angles to each other. This started a popular movement where people would find any type of material and lay it out at right angles grouping like items together by size. This was made more popular by Tom Sachs and by the late Eighties knolling had become a trend. You can now see examples of knolling on Pinterest and Instagram.

How does LEGO fit into this? Well… if you lay out all the pieces from a new LEGO set and organize them by color, piece and size…you may be a closet Knoller! To some, tearing open all the bags, dumping the contents on the table to sort out, as they come out of the large sets, like the LEGO Porsche or Disney Castle for example, is just plain crazy. I mean why mix-up the contents of all the bags, when LEGO has already taken the time to break-out the bags to correspond with the manuals and help with your build?

It’s all about making order from chaos. There really is something quite calming about being able to easily find that one piece, and I know you have done this, critical to your build. In other builds, where you didn’t knoll your pieces, you swear LEGO has forgotten to include in your package and spent 15 mins looking for it. Just about ready to call customer service and get a replacement part….

So what about you? Are you a Knoller without even knowing it?

Feel free to leave me a comment, more importantly, I would love seeing your examples of knolling your sets.

Happy building!