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07.01.22

Fair Report

Europe’s Newest Design Fair Is In a Small City With a Big Focus on Locality and Sustainability

We were meant to attend and cover the second edition of Southern Sweden Design Days in Malmö last month, but since COVID had other plans for us, we had to catch up with the fair's program from afar instead, which included projects by studios like Malmö Upcycling Service, Lab La Bla, and Andréason & Leibel. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, many of them featured a focus on local manufacturing, local crafts, and/or locally sourced recycled materials, which not every design fair can claim.
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04.29.22

Up and Coming

Rasmus Nossbring’s Glass Sculptures Look Like They Were Squeezed Through a Tube of Swedish Caviar

For Swedish glassblower Rasmus Nossbring, it’s the immersive nature of the medium that’s so compelling. "Glass moves like nothing I've ever seen before and to use it demands full attention from your whole body and mind," says the Stockholm-based artist. "It’s like super Zen and an adrenaline rush at the same time. A lot of people describe it as a dance, and I would say that on the best days I feel like I become one with the material."
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11.16.21

Sighted

Hallelujah — Our Favorite Scandinavian Art Objects Retailer is Finally Shipping to the States

This week, the Swedish design object retailer The Ode To launches shipping to the United States — and just in time. We can't think of a better place to shop for gifts for people who are notoriously hard to shop for. Where else can you find a vase shaped like a white go-go boot, a sculpture meant to look like a watermelon, or a deflated mirror decorated with a truly unhinged smiley face?
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11.09.21

Q+A

Meet the Swedish Brand Championing “Bold Minimalism” With Rugs That Are Stylish, but Subtle

When Liza Laserow-Berglund, her husband Fabian Berglund, and his brother Felix Berglund decided to start a business together, the biggest thing they had in common was Sweden, and their desire to share some part of their native country’s vibe with the rest of the world. When they realized that rugs played a huge part in every Swede’s life, they founded Nordic Knots, a rug brand aimed at spreading the Scandinavian design gospel. Their goal? A highly curated brand offering mid-range rugs with a distinct point of view — but not one loud enough to overwhelm a room.
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10.25.21

Up and Coming

This Swedish Duo is Giving a Second Life To Industrial Waste

Axel Landström and Victor Isaksson Pirtti founded their design practice Lab La Bla in 2018 but their connection sparked way before that. The pair first met, hilariously, as toddlers in their native town of Luleå on Sweden’s Lapland coast, a remote region known for its subarctic climate, dense spruce forests, and history of iron mining — all topics Landström and Isaksson Pirtti continue to draw on in their practice.
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02.06.20

Up and Coming

Sorry, Hygge Hive — Mattias Sellden Just Took Nordic Design Out Of Its Comfort Zone

For Swede Mattias Sellden, the first step towards making a name for himself was, for better or worse, admitting that he wanted to. “For me, even showing what I do was a hurdle. I still don’t have a website and I started my Instagram only in August of last year — three months after my graduate exhibition.” Sellden chalks this reticence up to the Nordic code of conduct known as Janteloven, which he describes as “the very Swedish notion not be a show-off.”
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04.25.19

Sighted

This Design Museum Turns Real Swedish Homes Into Museums for a Day

The Swedish Design Museum is not your typical museum — it has no permanent collection, nor does it have a cool Modernist structure in which to house its contents. It's a virtual museum whose goal is to bring Swedish design to the many — the way accessible Swedish design was always meant to be. Now, however — in a slight twist — the Swedish Design Museum is offering visitors the rare opportunity to peep inside real Swedish homes, to witness IRL design as it was meant to be.
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02.12.19

Fair Report

30 Designers and Brands We Loved at Stockholm Design Week 2019

People often ask about our favorite furniture fairs (besides Milan and New York, of course), and we've always reflexively said Stockholm, due to the elevated baseline of good taste and sheer quality of work that tends to emerge from the Scandinavian capital. But in truth, neither Monica nor I had been to Stockholm Design Week in more than a decade. And as easy as it is journalistically to report a fair from afar these days, it's impossible to replicate the emotional high that comes from discovering something amazing where you least expected it. Having just returned from a leisurely weeklong stay in Stockholm, I'm happy to report that our instincts were correct: Stockholm remains one of the most vital and exciting stops on the design calendar.
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01.24.19

Current Obsession

Why is This Early 1900s Swedish Minimalist Suddenly All Over Instagram?

We’re not sure when it was that we first started noticing the late Swedish designer Axel Einar Hjorth popping up everywhere we looked. But whenever it was, you can now consider us full converts to the church of Hjorth, whose work remains disarmingly fresh 60 years after his death, mixing as it does both Art Deco and Modernist influences, and a sense of sophistication with something more primitive.
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12.18.18

Eye Candy

In a New Series, 3D-Rendered Anthuriums Look (Unsurprisingly) Just Like the Real Thing

Appropriately called Digibana, the series finds Anders Brasch-Willumsen exploring the Japanese art of arranging flowers in a digital context, created by way of 3D-rendering software that keeps the flora alive forever. “I like to think of this series as a futuristic Ikebana practice,” Brasch-Willumsen says, “where moments of beauty are created and preserved only by a constant stream of likes and shares.”
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09.07.18

Sighted

Furniture Made With Everything From Chipboard to Concrete

For last month's Malmöfestivalen, a creative arts weekend in Sweden, design collective Malmö Upcycling Service created an installation and furniture collection using waste from local industries — from textile boat covers to chipboard, rusty metals to polyester foam.
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08.24.18

Eye Candy

A Swedish Artist’s Gravity-Defying Stone Sculptures

Swedish artist Malou Palmqvist's wabi-sabi stacks of organic shapes are a studied interpretation of the scattered pieces of waste that wash ashore near her home in the Swedish archipelago. The textured forms — stoneware, wood carvings, and combinations of stone with plaster to create a marbled effect — are at once hefty and delicate, subtly clashing and full of whimsy.
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