‘Close to solitude, but with a neighbour’: Furu’s cabins in the woods are a tranquil escape

Certain images have the power to nestle in our minds and ripen into a vision when the time is right. Fifteen years ago, Aminata Sambe spotted such an image in a hotel group newsletter that showed a brutalist structure surrounded by rustic cabins on the northern tip of Gotland, Sweden’s largest island. The Fabriken Furillen hotel stood facing the Baltic Sea within a stark landscape filled with Scots pine. ‘It looked so peaceful, like that one place where there’s nothing to do,’ says Sambe, who was then a project manager at Villa Eugénie, a creative agency founded by Etienne Russo in Brussels in 1997. Sambe began working there in 2000, together with Nadia Saksou, a former colleague from a previous job at an advertising agency.

Creative project managers Furu: the beginnings

‘When we started at Villa Eugénie, there were maybe five people. We were doing everything,’ says Sambe of the formative years during which the duo evolved into the multi-hyphenate creatives they are today. For two decades and counting, they’ve project-managed fashion shows, set up events and devised pop-up stores for fashion brands such as Chanel, Hermès, Lemaire and Dries Van Noten, supervising 83 fashion shows for the Belgian designer, who presented his final collection last year.

‘It’s like being a chef d’orchestre,’ says Sambe of the feeling she gets when pulling together the many elements of a creative project. ‘From finding the location to sourcing the materials and gathering the team, what I really love is the excitement and challenge of it.’

Saksou adds: ‘I like to be a link between people. You’re never bored and always discover new things.’

Over the years, both women have cemented a solid reputation in a fast-paced industry. But they also developed a yearning for calm and quiet. To get away, Saksou keeps a charming old house in La Drôme, France. And in 2018, Sambe began looking for a destination far from the fashion crowd, too. ‘I wanted to go on holiday alone, to a place where I’d remain all alone,’ she says – and so she sought out the striking Gotland retreat, which had always stuck with her.

‘It’s magical,’ says Sambe. ‘When you arrive, something happens that you can’t really explain. It fills you with energy.’ The hotel’s owner Johan Hellström offered her a plot adjacent to Fabriken Furillen that could be subdivided. ‘I just couldn’t resist,’ she says. In 2020, when the pandemic shut down the event sector, Sambe and Saksou decided to ‘join forces and reinvent ourselves’, so they set up project management studio Furu, naming it after the Swedish word for ‘pine tree’. Says Sambe of the tree, ‘It grows on rocky soil yet can become huge and strong.’

Adds Saksou, ‘In Japanese, the word means “to fall from above” in the context of rain or snow. We liked the symbolism. It represents our capacity to grow, whatever the circumstance.’

Their next phase of growth is taking shape on two of the Gotland plots, where Furu has completed a summer home for a family and a house for Sambe, who spends about half the year there. ‘For both the client and my house, Furu prepared the mood board. Then we briefed the architect, Andreas Lyckefors, and Studio Volca, which designed the interiors,’ says Sambe. ‘In my house, each time you go up a flight of stairs, you view a different cardinal point. The client’s house is a family home, so it’s more about them receiving guests, it’s more inward-looking.’

The houses are next to each other in the middle of a natural reserve – ‘close to solitude, but with a neighbour’, remarks Lyckefors. ‘We wanted to preserve the privacy, and tried to solve that by creating small courtyards with deep sightlines to the landscape.’

The courtyards contain gardens designed by Anna Lundell, founder of local floral artist studio Kullshagebruk, and both structures are made mostly of natural materials: they have pine façades, hemp insulation and made-to-measure wooden furniture. In Sambe’s house, a sofa by Josef Pentenrieder for Hans Kaufeld and a vintage desk lamp by Louis Kalff for Philips stand out.

The two co-founders are no strangers to building sets or overseeing store renovations, but the Gotland homes show evidence of a desire to move from the ephemeral towards the more permanent.

For Lemaire’s S/S 2025 ready-to-wear show, they installed a set at the brand’s Place des Vosges HQ in which models walked a raised circular runway that led into the building’s courtyard as if heading out to Paris’ cityscape. ‘It’s the opposite of a set as temporary because [the brand] want to build on that structure in coming seasons,’ says Sambe. ‘They wanted people to feel at home as if they were guests at their offices, but also with an eye on sustainability.’ Furu reused the entire set for Lemaire’s A/W show (during Paris Fashion Week Men's A/W 2025). ‘We threw nothing away,’ she says.

Sambe and Saksou are currently working on an apartment renovation in Stockholm, as well as supporting supplier and client relationships for the construction of a Glenn Sestig-designed home in Antwerp. It’s all in the spirit of being that link between people, but also between people and their environment. ‘I think, for human beings, it’s important to relate to something bigger and keep dreaming,’ says Saksou. And these creative gestures will weather whatever falls from the skies.

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