Want to Have Your Work Judged by Sight Unseen in Stockholm Next Year? Apply to Greenhouse Today!

I've now been to Stockholm in the dead of winter, when the ground is often covered in ice, on four different occasions. I've visited in the throes of summer — season of archipelago-hopping, 10PM sunsets, and simple but chic country houses — a grand total of zero times. But there's a non-masochistic reason why I keep returning: The Stockholm Furniture Fair, which in 2025 runs from February 4-8, is one our longtime favorites, and it's become even moreso in the last couple of years as we've developed our partnership with the fair's organizers, adding a Sight Unseen Best in Show award to the fair’s emerging design showcase, Greenhouse. We're excited to announce we'll be returning to the fair in 2025 — having bestowed last year's honor on the exciting up-and-coming duo Bursell/Svedborg — and we're hoping to convince more than a few of you today to submit your work to the jury in the hopes of being selected for next year's fair.
More

On the Great Pine Resurgence of 2023 — AKA For Pine Nuts Who Love It Knotty

Have you been reading For Scale? It's the new furniture-focused Substack that seemingly everyone is already turned onto, and we get it — it's an absolute joy to read, with favorite topics so far including but not being limited to: plastic, children's furniture, the "twink aesthetic," and Psycho-Decorating 101 (a favorite Sight Unseen tome). So, we did what any editor with half a brain would do: We hired For Scale's excellent and very fun writer, David Michon, to pen what we hope is the first of many columns! Today's subject: a paean to PINE.
More

The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part I: Alvsjo Gard

After a three-year COVID hiatus, Stockholm Design Week returned in full force last week. And while we'll be covering the fair and its happenings around town tomorrow, today we're putting the spotlight on a new exhibition that also happened to be our favorite. Called Älvsjö Gärd, it was a showcase of experimental, research-driven, and collectible design, set across 13 rooms in one of the oldest manors in Stockholm — basically Sight Unseen catnip.
More

10 Things We’re Looking Forward To at This Year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair

Stockholm functions in many ways like a mini-Milan, which comes, in part, from being a city with an incredibly high baseline of appreciation for design: There's a predictably excellent emerging design showcase at the fair; there are exhibitions around town in the most wonderful and surprising locations (see this year's new experimental showcase at Älvsjö Gard, a never-before-used 16th-century manor on the fairgrounds); there are exciting launches from local talents, such as Fredrik Paulsen and Note Design Studio; and there is, if you can squeeze it in, an abundance of studio visits and sightseeing field trips you can take to round out your design education while you're there. (Let this be the year I finally make it to the Ragnar Östberg–designed City Hall!) Here are 10 of the things we're most looking forward to at Stockholm Design Week, which this year runs from February 6-12.
More
Ornsbergsauktionen at Stockholm Design Week

An Auction of Work By Emerging Talents is the Best Thing at Stockholm Design Week

For Örnsbergsauktionen’s sixth anniversary, the Swedish exhibition, produced annually by Fredrik Paulsen, Kristoffer Sundin, and Simon Klenell, is moving into swankier digs and partnering with Artek. But though the location is new, the event is still one of the best things about Stockholm Design Week, where the variety of experimental objects on view is a direct result of the designers’ extreme specializations and visions — no mass production necessary.
More
Fredrik Paulsen chairs

A Furniture Collection Inspired By Pick-Up Sticks

We gave you a sneak peek of Fredrik Paulsen’s solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Torri earlier this summer, but when we saw the Stockholm-based designer had properly photographed the whole collection, we wanted to share the results. Called Mikado — a name we assume originates from the European form of pick-up sticks — the chairs are made from simple pieces of pine that Paulsen stains a brilliant teal blue.
More

Örnsbergsauktionen 2015

Exhibition curators often face a funny dilemma: The more successful they become, the more great people start clamoring be involved in their projects, which ultimately only makes their selection process that much harder. Hence why the minds behind the Swedish design auction Örnsbergsauktionen — which for the past four years has consistently been pretty much the most amazing thing coming out of Stockholm Design Week — decided to tighten the curatorial reins this year, not only requiring that their 30 participants be designers who self-produce their own work in small batches but also leaning heavily towards the ones who work collectively or invent their own materials and processes. Once they managed to narrow their list down to the lucky few, which this year includes folks like Maria Jeglinska and Jenny Nordberg — plus of course founders Simon Klenell, Fredrik Paulsen, and Kristoffer Sundin themselves — they let the magic flow, resulting in the 40 objects that will head to the auction block on February 6. As usual, we've excerpted our favorites after the jump.
More

Ornsbergsauktionen 2014

If you're a longtime reader of our site, you might remember that February, despite being utterly gross in the weather department, is one of our favorite months if only for the Ornsbergsauktionen, an artist-run auction house that's taken place during each of the past three Stockholm Design Weeks. Started by Fredrik Paulsen, Simon Klenell, and Kristoffer Sundin, the auction gathers together limited editions and one-offs from designers we already know and love — Katja Pettersson, Uglycute, Silo Studio, Hilda Hillström — and always introduces us to a handful we can't wait to Google. This year, in addition to furniture and objects, the three also managed to wrangle works on paper from the Memphis Group's still-prolific Peter Shire and Nathalie du Pasquier. We've included a selection of our favorites below, but for the full catalogue, visit the (gorgeously designed) catalog website or see the objects in person if you're in Stockholm, on view through Friday!
More

Fredrik Paulsen, furniture designer

Fredrik Paulsen’s work, both as a designer and as a co-founder of Stockholm’s brilliant Örnsbergsauktionen is shaking the foundations of what you think Scandinavian design ought to be. “Here you are taught to produce work for the everyman,” Paulsen says. “It’s the legacy of IKEA: Good design for everyone. But if your work doesn’t really fit into mass production and it is not intended for it, then there is no platform or venue to show it.” It was this void that led Paulsen and his friends and fellow designers Simon Klenell and Kristoffer Sundin to stage their first auction during last year’s Stockholm’s Design Week. They invited contemporaries — some they knew, others they only knew of — to submit diverse, self-made works that went beyond the cookie-cutter forms they’d grown tired of, and put them up for bidding. It paid off.
More

Örnsbergsauktionen 2013

When Fredrik Paulsen, Kristoffer Sundin, and Simon Klenell organized an auction for independent design in the basement of their Stockholm studio last year, it was with a bit of trepidation: Would anyone come? Would the pieces sell? Would the Swedish design market, with its thirst for Scandinavian midcentury classics, be open to more unique and sometimes weird works? Apparently the answer was yes on all fronts, for the Ornsbergsauktionen — which was one of our favorite exhibitions of 2012 — is back this year in conjunction with Stockholm Design Week, complete with a gorgeous new graphic identity by Bergen, a sharp new website from Konst & Teknik, and new editions by returning favorites like TAF as well as newbies (and Sight Unseen friends) Gemma Holt, Hilda Hellström, and Silo Studio. In Stockholm, the viewing is open until the night of the auction, February 8, but you can get peek of the goods above (that's Paulsen's stained pine and Valchromat Prism shelf up top) and below, as well as on the auction homepage where pre-bids are being taken.
More

Örnsbergsauktionen at Stockholm Design Week

If you live in Chicago, and you’re interested in buying the self-produced, often prototypical work of today’s younger design generation, you might head to Sam Vinz and Claire Warner’s pop-up Volume Gallery, or maybe to Wright auction house. If you’re in New York or London, it’s Phillips de Pury. But Stockholm? “We really didn’t have a place like this,” says Fredrik Paulsen, a young Swedish designer, RCA grad, and co-creator of the Örnsbergsauktionen, a self-produced auction of 48 unique contemporary items launching this Friday in conjunction with Stockholm Design Week.
More