His first product was the Freedom Clock, a conical wooden table clock built around a quietly radical idea. Place it one way, and it tells the time; turn it over, and the clock face disappears, leaving behind a beautifully crafted piece of wood. It offers a small modern luxury: the freedom not to know the time, while keeping it within reach whenever you choose. With the first clock under his arm, he walked into La Troisième Main, one of Geneva’s leading design shops at the time, and simply asked if they would stock it. They said yes. “Nothing happens if you don’t ask,” he says — a lesson that has shaped his approach ever since.

The HANSRUEDI cuckoo clock followed, and it was this piece that really put him on the map. Deliberately given an unmistakably Swiss name, HANSRUEDI reimagines the traditional cuckoo clock by stripping it back to its essentials: Swiss wood, a Black Forest mechanism and a light sensor that silences the cuckoo at night. Each piece is individually numbered.

What makes the clock particularly special, however, is the story behind its production. Every HANSRUEDI is assembled by members of the Fondation Sgipa au Lignon, a Geneva workshop that employs people with disabilities. Søren worked closely with the workshop to develop the assembly process, and today each person has their own role and area of expertise. . The result is a product with real heart — one that brings together beautiful design, craftsmanship, inclusion and solidarity. It is a reminder that how an object is made, and by whom, can be every bit as meaningful as the object itself.

Geneva, he readily admits, is not the first city that comes to mind when we think of contemporary product design. But he has never seen that as a disadvantage. What the city offers instead is proximity: close relationships with craftsmen, workshops and local businesses that keep his work firmly connected to the people who actually make things.

From Geneva, however, his designs have travelled far — from the Centre Pompidou boutique in Paris and Teo Jakob to homes in Japan, Malaysia and California. As for what comes next, Søren has little interest in designing hundreds of products or chasing the latest trend. For him, creating fewer, better objects that are made to last is far more compelling than the constant pursuit of something new. His measure of success is refreshingly simple: if, twenty years from now, someone is still using one of his pieces because it has quietly become part of everyday life, then he will have achieved what he set out to do.

During our conversation, Søren mentioned, almost in passing, that design is not even his full-time occupation. He also works for the State of Geneva — two worlds that might seem far apart, yet he appears to move between them with remarkable ease.

As we said goodbye, he handed me two pairs of HANSRUEDI socks, each embroidered with a tiny cuckoo, one black and one white. They immediately made me think of yin and yang: seemingly opposing forces that are, in fact, complementary, each giving meaning to the other. It struck me as a fitting metaphor for Søren and his work — tradition and modernity, craft and design, past and present, not competing with one another, but quietly held in balance.

Søren Henrichsen’s work is available at sorenhenrichsen.com and at select design stores in Geneva, Switzerland and across Europe.

To find out more about the Fondation Sgipa and its work, visit sgipa.ch.