From Stockholm with Love
It’s no secret that Stockholm Furniture Fair is significantly smaller than it was 5 years ago. A combination of Covid, unfortunate timing (a February event) and the rise of 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen has proven to be a real challenge to this Swedish event. And yet the fair is still well worth a visit. Stockholm is simply too important and too deeply connected in terms of furniture design to be overlooked. Here are our highlights:
Form Us With Love: Bistro event
Formed With Love
Stockholm resident design heroes Form Us With Love turned their studio into a Bistro for the entire week. An industrial backdrop awash with sunshine and bright splashes of red accent colours was a fantastic venue for some new product launches. A further addition to +Halle® Nest collection is the new Nest Club chair, described by Form Us With Love (FUWL) as “a natural progression”. With seating proportions similar to the Nest Easy chair and a lower backrest, the soft club chair essentially evokes the idea of recreation and productivity taking place in the same seat. Form Us With Love have also developed a new metal frame structure, meaning the side table can be added to the chair at a later date - or can even be specified as right or left sided.
Nest Club Chair by Form Us With Love for +Halle
Also presented at the FUWL event was Industrial Facility’s new GRID table collection. Grid is the first product in the new ‘basic range’ from +Halle® and presents itself as an affordable range of everyday, anywhere tables. With a pared-down format of 80x80cm / 160x80cm / 240x80cm / 160x160cm, Grid is ideal for collaborating, learning, dining, as a side tables, or a simple desk. GRID is super easy to assemble, lift, reconfigure and package. Sturdy steel legs combine with a choice of tops, including Kvadrat Really Textile Tabletop™, an affordable circular option made from recycled t-shirts. In multiples, GRID comes alive, playfully joining squares and rectangles, colours and tops. Pricing for this collection is super impressive. Read more about Grid, Nest Club and other news from +halle on their refreshed website here.
Grid Table profiles close up
Bla Station launch SIX in Stockholm
Renowned Swedish innovators Bla Station always push hard on their home turf. And this year was no different, with the Bla team launching a total of six new product collections during Stockholm Design Week, where they played a major role. We’ll show three of the six new designs here, as we’re keeping it brief. But you can check out all six new pieces, plus their 2024 news here.
Decofunk
Decofunk (above) is a brand new decoration and acoustic wall system designed by Osko and Deichmann for Bla Station. The concept consists of a steel frame with a semi-circle shape and a wooden ball in the middle. The semi circle can be turned to face four directions and paired with other modules, creating endless variations. Solid wooden knobs, non-permanent add-ons in hot-moulded recycled polyester felt and soon with flat inserts in wood, steel or felt. Beautiful with and without fillers and available in a wide range of colours, stains and finishes.
Villhem
Translated from Swedish, ‘Villhem’ means simply “I want to go home”. And with a chair like this waiting for you, we’re not surprised.
Designed by Borselius & Bernstrand, Villhem is a deeper dive into the modularity we have seen with the recent Able seating collection. Consisting of a thinner metal rod frame which is screwed together with visible fixings, Villhem’s shell can be specified in natural or stained wood, with or without padding. Our favourite version (above) is the supersoft; with leather upholstery and nozag inner frame. As with the Able collection, Villhem can be personalised, armrests can be swapped (eg. from leather to wood or vice versa) and components can be exchanged. We can’t wait to welcome Villhem to hotels, lounges and private homes.
P.Y.R. protect your rights!
The simplistic yet stylish P.Y.R. Protect Your Rights chair by David Ericsson is a call to arms. In a world where consumers - uneducated about the origins of design - are presented with ideas stolen by copyists, who are in turn copied in a race to the bottom, PYR is essentially a protest. The questions are raised: “Is it possible to create a simple design like this without being copied? Should we give in to inevitability and let the copyists win? Or should we fight to protect design innovation?”
P.Y.R. comes with it’s own passport, identity, production number and even the factory drawings needed to produce the chair - open source style. In the words of Bla Station: Should innovative simplicity be considered as, “free-for-all”, or could it be just as valuable and worth protecting as the complicated?
What do you think?
Read more about Bla Station’s latest product launches here.