Gästis chair

Many have sat on his chairs in libraries, museums and government buildings. Yet Åke Axelsson, joint owner of Gärsnäs, is only known to the cognoscente outside his native Sweden. Stylepark visited his studio.

Hard-edged and technoid or soft and round – formally furniture and fashion are certainly not so far apart from each other.

They’re back in fashion – small, light armchairs with a wooden or tubular steel frame. In the 1950s and 1960s they came to fame as “easy chairs”; now they’ve morphed into “lounge chairs”. For the office or the home.

Stockholm Design Week revealed that noise reduction can look good and smartphones are also changing our furniture. But just what is behind “New Nordic”?

When the fair comes to town, as in the Stockholm Furniture Fair and the Northern Light Fair – galleries, studios and showrooms across the whole of Stockholm open their doors and the crowds come flocking. There’s always something new waiting to be discovered – in homes, in an old building near the docks, a repurposed parking lots, or even an attic. The Stockholm Design Week team even went so far as to fill a tunnel with robots.