In summary it is described a column for a piece of furniture as well as a piece of furniture with at least one movable member (1, 2, 31), wherein said part is adapted to be moved relative to the rest of the furniture in a non-manual way. Further, there is provided a device for detecting collisions of the automatically movable member with obstacles, an automatic drive mechanism (5, 6) which is adapted to move the movable member, a control device adapted to control the automatic drive mechanism (5, 6), and at least one sensor (4) adapted to detect a collision during the motion of the movable member (1, 2, 31) with an obstacle and to transmit this incident to the control device wherein the at least one sensor (4) comprises a force-sensitive sensor (41).