Great Nordic Furniture You (Probably) Can't Afford

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The 2016 Stockholm Furniture Fair has just ended, and it was full of pieces that show what Nordic design is about, and how much people now want from the things they live with. We have already written about the Danish furniture brand HAY. With the fair still fresh, here is a look at the busiest design brands on the Scandinavian peninsula.

Artek

In Finland, they say, nearly every household owns something by Artek. The Finnish architect and interior designer Alvar Aalto founded the brand in 1935, and most of what it makes is furniture he designed. From the start, its style paired a love of natural materials with Aalto's architectural thinking, and the results are plain and simple. Aalto was a master of getting the widest range of furniture out of the fewest materials and the simplest forms; he believed the soul of a design lay in its basic parts. Some go so far as to say that Artek's furniture, made from traditional Finnish birch, is a synonym for Nordic design: it feels exactly like what furniture should be.

In September 2013 the Swiss furniture maker Vitra bought Artek, which still runs as an independent company.

Menu

This Danish brand was founded in 1979, and its products turn up often in our Great Design column. See enough of them and you notice that Menu has the calm, steady quality typical of Scandinavian design: its pieces are useful, well made and good-looking. Their clean, elegant shapes make them worth having around even when nobody is using them.

Menu is open-minded about design and gives its designers plenty of room. They are free to experiment with both materials and forms, and many of the pieces challenge the familiar shapes of everyday objects.

The Yeh side table, for example, solves an old problem: a round table can't stand flush against a wall.

Or take the WW Carafe. Its shape went through more than 20 versions before it was settled, all to find the best path for the wine as it pours.

ferm LIVING

ferm LIVING is a young Danish brand, founded in 2005. Its founder, Trine Andersen, was a graphic designer. While decorating her own home, she couldn't find wallpaper that was both attractive and affordable, so she designed a range herself, and ferm LIVING was born.

It is a textbook Nordic design brand: clean lines and shapes, bright and warm colors. But compared with other furniture brands active in the region, such as HAY, Menu, Normann Copenhagen and Muuto, ferm LIVING likes to work patterns into its furniture and accessories, which owes something to its founder's background in graphic design.

Iittala

The Finnish brand Iittala was founded in 1881 and is more than 135 years old. It takes its name from a small town 50 kilometers north of Helsinki, the Finnish capital. In Finland, Iittala glass is a guarantee of both good looks and good quality.

Unlike many Nordic homeware brands, Iittala concentrates on blown and pressed glass, and its polishing, lacquering and engraving have produced quite a few classics.

One is the Lantern series, designed in 1999 by Harri Koskinen, now Iittala's global design director. The candle holders have clean, simple lines, and the flame, seen through the mouth-blown glass, seems to float in mid-air. The series entered the permanent collection of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2013 Lantern was redesigned as a plug-in table lamp, because Koskinen wanted to bring more light into a room.

Kaj Franck's Kartio series of 1958, a set of plain, minimal pitchers and tumblers, shows how perfectly he balanced material and geometric form. Kartio's wide range of colors also shows off Iittala's lead in colored glass.

Fredericia

The 1950s were the golden age of modern Nordic furniture, and Andreas Graversen timed his move well. He bought Fredericia, a company founded in the 1910s that was close to bankruptcy, persuaded the celebrated Danish furniture designer Børge Mogensen to join, and within a short time made it one of Denmark's most popular furniture makers.

Between 1955 and 1972 Mogensen designed a series of new pieces that turned elements of classical Danish furniture into modern design. The Spanish Chair, developed in 1958, is still one of Fredericia's best-known products.

In the 1990s Nanna Ditzel became the company's chief designer. Her Trinidad Chair won an award in the United States, and sales took off.

offecct

This Swedish design company was founded in 1990 by Kurt Tingdal and Anders Englund. offecct makes mostly furniture, combining local craft traditions with products built to last. That idea of lasting extends to the environment too, for example in its use of renewable materials.

In 2015 the company launched OFFECCT LifeCircle®, a concept built around making products last longer. That means not only making durable furniture but also reusing old pieces. Then again, durable furniture has always been a mark of Nordic design.

Normann Copenhagen

The Copenhagen brand Normann Copenhagen was founded in 1999 by the designers Jan Andersen and Poul Madsen. Its first product, though, came in 2002: Norm 69, the "pinecone lamp." You assemble it yourself, slotting 69 pieces of foil together like building blocks with no glue at all. It is a clever design. Light spreads through the foil into the room, and the lamp itself casts layers of light and shadow. Many of the brand's other lamps also look as if they were snapped together from blocks, with a playful, childlike spirit.

Normann Copenhagen now makes a wide range of furniture, lighting and accessories, and its products are often full of fun ideas: simple, but not simplistic. Bright colors give them energy and make them a good fit for younger buyers.

Muuto

Muuto, also from Copenhagen, sticks more closely to the Nordic design tradition. Founded in 2006, it is one of the brands that have made their name internationally in recent years. Its name comes from the Finnish word muutos, meaning change. Although nearly all the designers it works with come from Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, it sets out to look at Nordic design from a fresh angle.

Muuto makes furniture, lighting and accessories, and works with more than 30 designers. Its products carry on the Nordic tradition of practicality: very simple shapes, a focus on function, and usually a choice of several colors, which makes them easy to fit into a home.

Wästberg

The Swedish lighting brand Wästberg has been a fixture at trade fairs in recent years, winning a long list of awards and working with internationally known designers such as David Chipperfield, Inga Sempé and Nendo. Yet it is a young brand, founded only in 2008. Its founder, Magnus Wästberg, has spent many years in the lighting business, and he has posted a strikingly romantic manifesto on the company website.

Wästberg's lamps are clearly Nordic: minimal geometric shapes, the occasional bright color, nothing that grabs attention at first glance. Even the names are plain and traditional, a W followed by a number. But Wästberg always adds small details that make a lamp more useful, such as a clip on the base or a row of USB ports. The shade of the Nendo lamp can even be taken off and used on its own as a tray for odds and ends.

&tradition

The Danish brand &tradition, a regular at the big design fairs lately, is in fact less than 6 years old. Its name signals respect for Nordic tradition, but it cares just as much about new ideas. We have written before about the "palette table" that the Spanish designer Jaime Hayon and the Italian designer Luca Nichetto made together: three tops that differ in material, shape and color, set at different heights to strike a neat balance.

Another piece, a pendant lamp, is modeled on the old lamps once used on Copenhagen's docks. Its arched steel shade narrows downward and inward, mixing an old-fashioned feel with modern design. The lamp comes from the Danish studio Space Copenhagen. &tradition does not limit itself to Nordic designers or a Nordic style, but simplicity, elegance and fine craft still run through its work.