Stockholm Design Week 2024: the northern highlights

Tillsammans.

It’s a word I’ve loved for a long time, in spite of the fact that I don’t speak a jot of Swedish. (Apart from ‘tillsammans’, that is.) I first encountered it in the form of a Lukas Moodysson film title from the early 2000s. Wonderfully sonorous, it means ‘together’, a clearly ironic choice by the director, given the story is one of love and dysfunction in a mid-1970s hippie commune.

The word kept coming back to me during a recent trip to Stockholm for the city’s annual design week, where I found myself, on the first morning, huddled together with a cohort of international design journalists in front of Nordiska Kompaniet, the high-end department store – our proximity to each other necessitated as much by the sub-zero temperatures as by the desire to get as clear a view as possible into the store windows, which had been transformed into micro-exhibition spaces showing the work of a judiciously selected group of Swedish creatives.

Some had been commissioned by premium leather tannery brand Tärnsjö to experiment with its materials, resulting in a collection of unexpected and intriguing forms and typologies, while others, such as architect Anders Johansson of Bodafors Furniture, took a different material route as part of NK’s ‘Made in Sweden’ initiative. Braving the biting cold in a mere duffle coat (the man is clearly made of stronger stuff than I am) and with microphone in hand, he explained to the attendant crowd how his rational, ‘fat’, solid-wood furniture pieces seek to ‘devalue the idea of style’, thus contributing to their long-life sustainability.

‘What we know about the future is that we can’t predict the future’. On the other side of town, Karin Blomberg of Form Us With Love walked us through the Swedish design office’s collaborations with a quartet of brands – Stolab, Ateljé Lyktan, Forming Function and Savo – as part of its ‘Testing Grounds’ temporary installation. The clue is in the title and the idea of togetherness is key: creating flexible systems, platforms, that respond to changing needs and behaviours through configuration and reconfiguration of various elements, rather than closed, obsolesence-bound products is what drives the paradigm-challenging FUWL team of genuine design thinkers.

At the Stockholm Furniture Fair itself – the largest congregation, of course, of international visitors during the design week – a raft of Nordic manufacturers demonstrated how joined-up thinking can result in products that encourage us to unite, with user well-being and environmental consideration foremost. Acoustic specialists Abstracta’s new Akunok collection of sofas and soft screens – developed by Warsaw-based designer Maja Ganszyniec – function as pieces of micro-techtonic architecture, where intersecting, upholstered planes provide semi-private seating spaces for colleagues and friends (or, perhaps, even lovers) to come together, while their corners and voids serve to trap sound. For Vestre, meanwhile, the Tellus communal bench was on show for the first time which has been in the business of creating social meeting spaces for over 70 years now, specialising as it does in urban and outdoor furniture – the world's first bench made from 100-percent fossil-free steel, designed by Emma Olbers.

The Vestre fair stand was designed this year by Note (design studio), the Stockholm-based outfit who’ve recently opened an office in Copenhagen. One of their founder partners, Cristiano Pigazzini, also made an appearance with fast-evolving Seoul-based brand Wekino, where he had been charged with curating a dynamic new roster of South Korean designers to collaborate on a collection of bold and expressive products. ‘Wekino approached Note initially with an invitation for us to design for them,’ explains Pigazzini. ‘We thought it would be far more interesting and meaningful to help them find home-grown Korean talent.’ The result reflects at once the country’s craftsmanship heritage and its vibrant modernity and speed.

No visit to SFF would be complete, of course, without a visit to the String stand. Aside from the welcome opportunity to help celebrate the manufacturer’s 75th anniversary (daytime drinking!), it was a chance to talk in-depth to TAF Studio – also known as interior architects and designers Gabriella Lenke and Mattias Ståhlbom – about their new collaboration with the respected Swedish brand. ‘If I were a pullover, I’d choose to live here,’ quipped Ståhlbom about Relief, their sensitively composed storage system (of course it’s a system; this is String we’re talking about), specially designed for clothes. Tip: if you want to see a thing of beauty, check out the junctions where the front, side and top panels meet. Exquisite.

But there was a lot more to encounter beyond the fair, of course. Too much to mention here, save for a couple of highlights. One was the spectacular brand relaunch of one of the stalwarts of 20th-century design history, Iittala. Long associated with the iconic glassware designs of legends Alvar Aalto and Tapio Wirrkkala, the company treated the international press to an abstract sound-and-dance performance in a decommissioned nuclear reactor hall. With the new creative director, Janni Vepsäläinen, on hand afterward to thank those attending and to tease them with the message that Iittala is entering a ‘new era’, there was a clear sense that this signposts a repositioning of the Finnish brand as a much more upscale proposition.

And from hot to cold. A detour on our homeward-bound car ride to Arlanda Airport took us into the snow-laden countryside, where a new hotel concept, an hour’s drive from the city, is aiming to become a major player in the business of climate-smart hospitality. Designed by architect Andreas Martin-Löf, Landet Stay comprises a series of eco-friendly cabins that touch the ground lightly with their ‘leave no trace’ conservation principle. Measuring almost 40 square metres in size and with full-height glazing framing jaw-dropping views, the pleasure they deliver for guests is two-fold: on the one hand Ingmar Bergman-like, idyllic surroundings, and on the other an interior-design scheme by London-based designer Tobias Vernon from 8 Holland Street defined by a calming palette and haptic materiality.

If you’re looking to get your tillsammans on, there are a lot worse places.

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