Stockholm Creative Edition: A Discovery of Emerging and Heritage Design in Stockholm

The activations featured a variety of the best Sweden has to offer in terms of furniture launches, showrooms, and independent design. It was wide ranging, yet curated in the way Scandinavia does best: thoughtful design presented cohesively.

Here we present a few of the exhibitions and tours that inspired and introduced us to the Swedish design landscape.

FORGO

FORGO was a presentation of everyday problems identified by the design studios Form Us With Love and FORGO, a studio incubated by Form Us to take on the personal and home care industry. These “problems” are seemingly small issues the everyman and woman deals with, that grow to be larger issues depending on their environmental impact. Many examples included reducing plastic packaging and moving product into packaging that can be reused many times, as well as concepts for with liquid products (like shampoo) to be made into replaceable solids that improve upon current iterations. The studios worked to create new systems to mass manufacture powder soap which allows for less single-use dispensers to be thrown away, as well as more product taking up less space during transport.

The presentation visually highlighted all the ways both studios are working to create “future-proof” products and systems to step away from many of the pitfalls of mass production.

CREAM

CREAM is a series of exhibitions that explore the boundaries of art and design. The show was curated by Stockholm-based art consultant Jonas Kleerup, whose selections were a compelling mix of conceptual and thought-provoking works. The mix of works on view were by both established and emerging designers, sometimes even a blend of the two as a a few early prototypes were spotted that are now being mass-produced, such as two early pieces from Cara Davide’s Carabottino collection, now produced by Medulum

CREAM’s focus was about the work, rather than the newness of a particular piece, which allowed the avant-garde designs to be in conversation with one another, spotlighting their similarities and differences.

STUDIO B3

Studio B3 is a multiline showroom in the central Norrmalm nieghborhood of Stockholm that introduced us to contemporary furniture lines, as well as reintroductions to heritage lines like Karl Andersson & Söner.

Within the showroom we discovered Örsjö Belysning, a lighting line with a long history, including a lighting production deal with IKEA in the 1950s. A common thread with many of the Swedish brands on the tour was the duality of respecting their history and craft, while also being forward-thinking, which includes collaborating with young designers and producing more unique works.

One of these collaborations led by Örsjö was with Folkform, a studio founded by young Swedes Anna Holmquist and Chandra Ahlsell, whose work is a marriage of a craft-based approach to create distinctive works that play on scale and materiality.

Örsjö is manufacturer and distributor of Folkform’s white edition of their plissé table lamp.

OGEBORG

Another family-run company, Ogeborg was established in the 60s and since then has established itself as a showroom for fully customizable, sustainably focused rugs. They are proudly a climate-neutral company and invest in third world projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally. The attention to detail was evident in the showroom, with shelves filled with carpet cuts and samples, and threads of the most beautiful tonal colors. For Stockholm Creative Edition the focus was on a presentation of their collaboration with Toniton, a color consultancy for interior design, and Mabel Dapling, curated by internationally recognized colorist (and Toniton co-founder) Tekla Severin.

Ogeborg’s new collaboration yielded colorful and exciting palate of patchwork rugs with different piles and textures, each one a beautiful work of art.

GÄRSNÄS

Gärsnäs, yet again another family-owned company producing furniture since 1893, presented their new collections and showroom during Stockholm Creative Edition. The House of Gärsnäs, their office, and showroom, is located in Stockholm on Skeppsholmen, a small island with former military housing, best known for being the location of the Moderna Museet. Gärsnäs’s showroom, in a standalone former guardhouse, is enveloped in soft colors, and the spaces within are presented as they would be in a home. A favorite new release was the Dag Daybed - a collaboration with young designers Teresa Lundmark and Gustav Winsth - an arthropod of a design with many cushions forming into one long lounge. Another was the Julius seating collection designed by the duo Färg & Blanche, whose wooden seatbacks are punctured with threaded stitching, creating an elegant and unexpected border.

NEW CONTEMPORARY

One of the crown jewels of Stockholm Creative Edition was the exhibition New Contemporary, a presentation of fifty works by recent graduates of Stockholm’s design schools. Student designs are very interesting because the work typically focuses on experimentation and development of a longer project, versus furniture that needs to be purely functional with commercial mass appeal.

Read our standalone feature about New Contemporary here