If anyone needed proof this year that Scandinavia had quietly usurped London’s status as the world’s hottest contemporary design scene, it could be found at the Salone del Mobile in April, where the presentation that Danish brand Hay put on, complete with a pop-up shop and an utter madhouse of a cocktail party, was pretty much the talk of the town. It’s entirely thanks to the rise, in the past few years, of not just Hay but brands like Menu, Ferm Living, One Nordic, Muuto, Gubi, and Design House Stockholm, all of whom are working with emerging talents across the region. As we’ve watched the Nordic scene grow, we’ve managed to pay visits to Sweden (three times), Denmark (twice), and Finland (once, in the dead of winter, natch) — even to Iceland, for its DesignMarch festival three years ago. That left Norway as our personal holy grail, made doubly intimidating because of its famed reputation for being outrageously expensive. Two weeks ago, as you may have noticed on Instagram, we finally took the plunge.
While in Oslo for four days — and the Norwegian countryside for two more — we met quite a few of the design scene’s best talents, and we also visited the studios of two young but established artists that made us wish we’d brought our fancy camera along on the trip. Those discoveries we’re hanging on to, in order to share them with you in a more thorough manner in the next two months. But we figured we’d put together a little travel diary in the meantime, so you can see what we saw while zipping around the world’s second-richest country, trying not to spend money on anything other than wacky postcards and a massive data plan.
The first piece of contemporary design we encountered in Oslo was probably its most famous one: the national Opera House by Snøhetta, whose climbable white-marble roof-lawn was just as impressive in person as in pictures.
We also got the chance to experience a slightly older architectural icon, a house built in 1938 by the functionalist icon Arne Koursmo. The owner, noted explorer Erling Kagge, let us come in for a tour.
Kagge is the proud owner of a Rolls Royce once belong to Franz West, who kept a rotating cast of weird hood ornaments on hand for every day of the week.
Kagge’s living room, which contains some of the house’s original furnishings along with pieces from his impressive collection of contemporary art.
A nook in the living room containing a blue mobile by Nathan Carter.
Other original artifacts we spotted around the house. (To see more shots we took there, head over to our Facebook page, where we’ve posted three times as many photos as in this post.)
Proof that Norway is special: These were the curtains hanging in its city hall, where a giant room on the 7th floor is also given over to a young artist as a residency every two years. Amazing.
The gorgeously tesselated walls in the building’s main hall.
Why doesn’t the US have a Hay store? At the Danish brand’s flagship in Oslo, we coveted everything — even the marble cash wrap, with a Bouroullec print hanging behind it.
The city’s best homegrown design boutique, in our opinion, was Kollekted By, opened in August by two stylists stocking a selection of Nordic objects, including pieces by young Norwegian designers like Gunzler Polmar.
Objects from the Danish brand Menu at Kollekted By.
At Gallery 0047 — which we heard is like the Storefront for Art and Architecture of Oslo — we fell in love with these Riff chairs by Kinnarps, which we’d never seen before.
Another stylishly appointed cultural institution we visited was the artist-run gallery Kunsternes Hus, which had a show on of drawings by the late great textile designer Synnøve Anker Aurdal, whose work you should Google immediately if you don’t already know it.
Though Aurdal’s heydey was in the ’60s and she died in 2000, the drawings were somehow only recently discovered, offering new insight into her practice.
We couldn’t believe how timeless they looked. Couldn’t you so easily see this table at the Art Book Fair?
Speaking of art books, in the lobby of Kunsternes Hus (which is mostly occupied by an incredible cafe where we had the most amazing wild nettle soup) there was a small book shop selling cool books and journals, as well as this wall installation of old framed art-book covers.
We took this photo in a back alley of Oslo, which our GPS navigated us through on the way to find a shop we were looking for. And yet it still broke our Instagram record for most-liked photo ever. Not bad, Oslo.
We thought nyMusikk was cool enough when we first learned about it — it’s a cultural organization which commissions and exhibits new music and sound art — and then we found out that one of Oslo’s top product and furniture designers, Andreas Engesvik, designed its offices, right down to the pink ductwork.
More pink: the marbled facade of an amazing office building on the fjord. Keep in mind that this was shot at eye level — the entire building was covered in these tiles.
When we stopped by the art space 1857, they had basically moved the gallery onto the roof of the building for the summer, for their show Sunbathers. We liked these crazy moon rocks by Santiago Tacchetti.
And this polka-dotted grill by Brooklyn artist Margaret Lee.
At the Astrup Fearnely museum, we saw a great retrospective of the Norwegian artists Elmgreen and Dragset, who turned the downstairs bathroom / coatroom area into a creepy spa called Amigos.
We also hit up the art gallery Standard, who was hosting a very minimalist show by Oscar Tuazon.
The Office For Contemporary Art Norway seems like a regular old arts center, and we did check out a great show of 70s female textile artists while we were there, which included this piece by Sidsel Paaske. But the director told us that the center is more about research and engaging in international dialogue than exhibitions, which was interesting.
Another piece at the OCA textiles show.
We also saw a little bit of art outdoors, where the weather couldn’t have been more beautiful. This Dan Graham pavilion was installed high on a hill in the Ekeberg sculpture park, which also has a great restaurant.
After spending four days in Oslo, we headed out into the Norwegian countryside, and spent a single night at the most incredible hotel we’ve ever stayed in: The Juvet Landscape Hotel, where each room is a tiny cabin with one wall of floor-to-ceiling windows looking out into the natural surroundings. This was my view upon waking up.
The experience was so ridiculous that the next morning when we went for a jog in the valley behind the hotel, we saw not one but TWO rainbows.
Juvet is part of the country’s new National Tourist Route, for which the government hired famous architects to spend the last few years filling the countryside with incredible tourist centers, lookout points, and other built interventions designed for enjoying nature. This one was in Trollstigen, and was built by Reiulf Ramstad Architects.
On our way to the next one, we stopped for a bathroom break at this cute little inn called Djupvasshytta…
… which turned out to be full of some of the most amazing vintage textile wall hangings we’d ever seen. There was no one around when we came in, otherwise we probably would have begged to buy one from them.
In Hjerkinn, we hiked 20 minutes up the side of a mountain to make a pilgrimage to Snøhetta’s Reindeer Pavilion, also part of the National Tourist Route. Totally worth it. The other side of the building, not seen in this photo, is another floor-to-ceiling glass wall, this one looking out onto the very mountain from which Snøhetta took its name.
On the drive back to Oslo to catch our flight onward to Art Basel, which we’ll report on later this week, we stopped at the ceramics studio of Ment, inside an old ski factory in Lillehammer. We loved these angular black vases, but no way were they going to fit in our suitcases. Maybe next time.
Designers around the world owe Johanna Agerman Ross a drink, or perhaps even a hug: Her new project, the biannual magazine Disegno, is devoted to letting their work breathe. “I always found it frustrating working for a monthly, because I couldn’t give a subject enough time or space to make it worthwhile,” says the former Icon editor. “For a project that took 10 or 15 years to make, it felt bizarre to represent it in one image, or four pages.” Founded by her and produced with the help of creative director Daren Ellis, Disegno takes some of the visual tropes of fashion magazines — long pictorial features, single-photo spreads, conceptual photography — and marries them with the format of a textbook* and the investigative-reporting ambitions of The New Yorker. The story about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec which we’ve excerpted here, for example, fills 22 pages of the new issue and runs to nearly 3,000 words; it’s accompanied by images captured over two full days the photographer spent with the brothers, one in their studio and one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where they were installing their latest retrospective, “Bivouac.” And articles on Martin Szekely, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake’s Yoshiyuki Miyamae are set either over lunch, or in the subject’s living room. The focus, says Agerman Ross, is on proper storytelling. “The people behind the project, the process of making something, even the process of the writer finding out about the story — that’s all part of it,” she says. “It’s the new journalism.” Obviously, we couldn’t agree more.
At the London Design Festival in 2009, Apartamento magazine collaborated with local furniture wunderkind Max Lamb on a show called “The Everyday Life Collector.” The title referred to Lamb’s father, Richard, who had spent more than 15 years surrounding himself with British studio pottery, of which 400 examples were on view. But while age might have given him a leg up in the volume department, it turned out that the elder Lamb wasn’t the only one with the collecting bug: Max, too, admitted to joining his dad at flea markets from time to time and almost never coming home empty-handed. So when we had the idea to start a new column called Inventory — for which we’d ask subjects to photograph a group of objects they found meaningful — we turned to Max first, and he didn’t disappoint. He sent us 10 images of the collections on display in his live-work studio in London, then gave us a personal tour.
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a stunning geometric '70s tapestry piece, dispatches from the LA Art Book Fair, an unconventional take on a diamond ring, and a jealousy-inducing Art Deco-era necklace (pictured above) found by Caitlin Mociun at an antique fair in Miami.