The Stockholm Furniture Fair, the heart of Stockholm Design Week, is the premier venue, next to Milan, for Scandinavian and Nordic designers, producers and general agents to show off their goods. Although its mainly a trade show for big established brands it’s also a great place to spot emerging talents and small producers.
The 2015 edition of Stockholm Furniture Fair had a big turnout of established new nordic design brands and producers like HAY, &tradition, Normann Copenhagen, Muuto, Nomess, Menu, NIkari and Massproductions, but also a significant number of smaller and more niched brands like FRAMA, Tingest and brand new Woud made their presence felt. So in no particular oder we give you some of the highlights from the latter category.
Makers With Agendas, established by architect Julien de Smedt and designer William Ravn, has a very particular way of delivering seemingly simple solutions for complex design tasks. The Knot Shelf and Knot Table by William Ravn make up a compact and flexible storage system based on traditional joinery, and can be assembled without any tools. Wouter Dons‘ Pivot chair is a foldable chair with a construction that is as clever as its unusual. de Smedt’s idiosyncratic Pull-Pong table, is a combined pingpong, workstation and dinner table, foldable and adjustable for every different purpose. We won’t try to explain it, you kind of have to see it for yourself.
Another Copenhagen based brand, New Works, mainly produce smaller objects and lightning in collaboration with a diverse group of designers. Among the more unconventional pieces we found Magnus Pettersen‘s Untitled Concrete Chair and David Taylor‘s Crowd Candleholders, both with a very unique approach to materiality and design. Although Pettersen’s and Taylor’s works are very different they both explore the current state of art, design and craft from their respective practice.
Please Wait to Be Seated shared exhibtion space with MA/U Studio and we got to see the latest launch from PWTBS firsthand, the unexpectedly large Planet Lamp by Mette Schelde. MA/U showed their range of modernist inspired and meticulously designed pieces, like the storage system R.I.G.
Swedish Minus Tio is a small but prolific company based in Malmö, for this year’s fair they presented a number of new chairs, pictured here is Lodger, a very compact armchair by legendary Swedish designer Mats Theselius in collaboration with Minus Tio’s Andreas Roth.
David design, also based in the south of Sweden, brought a lot of new pieces, among other things a new stackable chair, Lean by Daniel Enoksson. The Lean chair is like most of Enoksson’s designs characterized by lightness and an almost fragile appearenace.
NakNak, onomatopoetically named after the sounds heard in metal workshops, is a new Taiwan based brand producing simple everyday objects of wire and sheet metal. For this first collection NakNak has worked with an impressive international lineup of young designers like Stockholm-based Afterroom, super-productive collaborators Kyuhyung Cho and Erik Olovsson, TAF, Yenwen Tseng etc.
Swedish producer Källemo is perhaps for some mostly associated with the Scandinavian design philosophy that emerged in the 80’s and 90’s. But following last years unexpected and critically acclaimed collaboration with Gustav Person, the shaker inspired Plint bench was launched this year. Person’s work is generally inspired by provincial woodworking and joinery.
Tingest premiered last year with smaller pieces exclusively designed by Alexander Lervik, the 2015 edition includes a number of other acclaimed designers such as , FolkForm, Broberg & Ridderstråle and Färg & Blanche.
