A postcard from Stockholm Design Week 2025

This year’s Stockholm Design Week was a microcosm for the predicaments of the design industry more broadly. Until not long ago, the fairground was at the heart of the event each year in early February. Its halls were filled with Scandinavia’s mighty furniture manufacturers, showing the rest of the world how to marry time-honoured values with new ideas to maintain relevance and fortify progress. The design week was an industry affair; a business event with enough festival fringing to keep the emerging tribe of lifestyle journalists engaged.

In 2025, as with the majority of Europe, the Swedish economy is struggling. Civil unrest has surfaced and Russia’s war looms large. Design does not exist in a vacuum from the forces that shape society, politics, and life beyond; so it is entirely understandable that this year’s design week was relatively muted (in volume if not talks programs, of which there were several, excellent ones). The fairground was quiet. Venues across the city hosted exhibitions and studios opened their doors, but the overall feeling was meek, by comparison with years gone by. One designer reframed the narrative at the start of his talk: ‘Stockholm Design Week has always been 90% about the people that come and the conversations you have, and only 10% about the stuff that you see.’

One of the biggest topics of conversation was ‘3 Days of Design’ in Copenhagen. The ingénue festival during June has quickly become the most glamorous, enjoyable design event on the global calendar. Shrunken marketing budgets abound across the design sector - and even Sweden’s design brands are holding out for Copenhagen rather than spreading their spend across both events. ‘Who wouldn’t prefer to visit Copenhagen in summer than Stockholm in winter?’ It’s a question several Swedes ask throughout the week with a hint of gallows humour.

We for one (title) will always come back to Stockholm in February because the city, its design community and heritage have a deeply held place in our hearts and pages, and have done since day one of Wallpaper*. We love nothing more than the transition from bitingly wet-cold, snowy streets to warm, candlelit, brass-twinkled, Gotland sheepskin-laden interiors. We love Svenskt Tenn and 7-Eleven pic-n-mix, breakfast at Ett Hem, Råraka at PA&Co, sandwiches overladen with shrimps and mayonnaise in clattery Saluhall and gossipy night caps at Konstnärsbaren. Stockholm furniture fair was founded in 1951 and though it might be in waning mode right now, waxier times will surely return.

That’s the big picture. What was most interesting to witness last week was how quickly and effectively the design week has shape-shifted into a B2C showcase. This is the case more broadly in the industry too, as brands and manufacturers close their purse strings, emerging designers are working with greater self-sufficiency in the collectible design realm. Galleries and shops (and even F&B establishments) are stepping up to host, reissue, commission and curate in place of manufacturers. One of the biggest presences across the week was Nordic Nest - an e-commerce platform shipping furniture and ‘Scandinavian lifestyle’ to more than 70 countries around the world. And herein lies some sort of truth: for as long as Scandinavian lifestyle has a market, Stockholm Design Week will have a future.

Wallpaper’s highlights from Stockholm Design Week

Special Effects by David Taylor at Bukowski Auction House

The Mellosa-based Scottish silversmith showed 25 aluminium objects that were riotously simple, genius and characterful expressions of process and material. A standout standing clock was arguably the definitive piece and image of the entire week. From furniture to lighting in all configurations and scales, together with a beautiful array of candlesticks and candelabra, here was a show that we would have travelled to Stockholm for with or without a design week in the background.

www.superdave.se

The Kings Hat by Nick Ross x Contem

Another Swedish-Scot of extraordinary talent, Nick Ross’s solid wooden furniture and objects marked the debut of a new brand Contem. His collection ‘The King’s Hat’ was made from wind-fallen branches collected from the island of Kungshatt. Hefty in substance and deftly refined, Ross has a Judd-like ability with material and form, with a dose of his own Scottish charm in the mix.

https://www.nickross.studio/

NO-GA (Nordiska Galleriet)

Under the recent creative direction of Hanna Nova Beatrice, Scandinavia’s doyenne of design, the gallery has become a vivid and exciting cultural entity. More than a fun place to hang out, HNB is reimagining how retail becomes relevant in our fluxial times (also editor and publisher of The New Era magazine - she has literally written the handbook) and NO-GA was the epicentre of design week. Among several showcases, launches and events that took place there, we are delighted to see Axel Wannberg’s Lamp 53 make it into production in steel, in blue, mustard and grey.

https://www.nordiskagalleriet.se/

AI - Brilliantly Bad! By Front Design

Also at NO-GA, Wallpaper* favourites Front Design showed a work in progress project ‘Brilliantly Bad!’ (the title, not the project) using AI as a tool to demonstrate the all-pervading entity’s friendlier side as a design collaborator. In three ceramic sculptures there was a huge amount to unpack about what AI knows and what it doesn’t and what that says about humanity, past and future. Oof.

http://www.frontdesign.se/

Geometry glassware by Claesson Koivisto Rune for Orrefors

NO-GA also hosted Stockholm stalwarts Claesson Koivisto Rune’s new collection of glassware for Orrefors. The mouthblown range of glassware uses essential geometric forms to construct various idealised drinking vessels. We did not drink from them so cannot vouch in this instance whether function follows form, but they are definitely exquisite forms. And we applaud Orrefors (founded in 1898) for continuing to push boundaries even in difficult times.

https://www.orrefors.com/

Note Design Studio

A visit to Note Design Studio’s Stockholm HQ in a refurbished old bank revealed a thoroughly exciting multi-faceted, mid-level practice expanding its tendrils of design expertise into life, beyond the confines of stuff. We were introduced to a new paint colour range for Danish colour brand Bleo (Note has recently opened an outpost in Copenhagen). Note is working with Neko Health - the body scanning tech start-up from Spotify founder Daniel Ek - to bring design and humanity to a frontier experience. The studio has also completed its first architectural project - a clever and cosy house for a young couple in the north of Sweden. Fascinating projects of note by Note - and from which we take note that they are a careful, exciting and ambitious design studio of and for the future.

https://notedesignstudio.se/

NJRD by Bernadotte & Kylberg

A debut range of furniture charmingly titled Vior, which means ‘Swedish moments’ was launched by local design duo Bernadotte & Kylberg. The range, which is sold through Nordic Nest, captures the warmth and essence of vernacular Swedish family furniture, gently softened and refined for production. We swooned over the oak Kitchen Sofa, which the duo described as the kind of piece that dogs and children climb over, laundry, newspapers and people hang-out on. ‘We all gather in kitchens,’ Bernadotte said at the launch, ‘We have a particular empathy for kitchen culture in Sweden.’

https://www.njrd.com/

KORD

A new brand launched over breakfast at Ett Hem with the bold and admirable (if somewhat familiar) mission to ‘bring elegance and smartness to functional objects that often get overlooked’. First-up in Kord’s target is the gruesomely bland and cumbersome power adapter. Designed by Gustav Rosen, following 35 prototype concepts, the Cuboid is a nifty, natty solution of sorts. For the ground it makes in efficiency and beauty, it loses slightly in materiality: made in plastic with 50% recycled content. Good, but could it be better? Answers on a post-kord… Kord will launch Cuboid on Nordic Nest in March, retailing from 65 Euros.

https://www.nordicnest.com/

Simon Skinner lighting

Simon Skinner is a young Stockholm designer and Konstfack graduate who we have firmly in our sights. His magnificent Buke lamps are made from vintage glass objects variously sourced by Skinner and assembled into lamps of singular character and collective wonder. The lamps were for sale and on show at NO-GA and in the fairground - and it’s little surprise they’d all but sold out by the time we happened upon them. Extra credit to Skinner for beautiful photography.

https://www.simonskinner.co/

Toogood as Guest of Honour

Faye’s studio is a popular guest of honour this year! Despite any deja vu, we are ardent fans - and, barely weeks after her honourship at Maison in Paris, it’s impressive to see the designer and her studio turn out an entirely different, fully realised installation concept in Stockholm. ‘Manufracture’ reveals the inner workings of the studio via prototypes, maquettes, sketches and injuries along the way. It was a charming, evocative and quietly powerful statement to make in the fairground, reminding visitors that the ‘finished’ article is wrestled into existence (and is never really finished, either).

https://t-o-o-g-o-o-d.com/

Frank in the Loom at Svenskt Tenn

A series of rag rugs inspired by Margit Thorén’s Schackruta rug, produced in a limited, numbered edition using leftover fabrics and offcuts from the production of Josef Frank’s textiles. They are beautiful in their own right. But the story of their production in Ukraine by a community who found themselves behind Russian lines when Putin invaded, and subsequently relocated to a village in the Carpathian mountains brings added poignancy here. Frank himself escaped Nazi Austria in the 1930s, where he was welcomed into Stockholm and Svenskt Tenn by Estrid Ericsson. The narrative circularity across time, culture and textile made for a moving exhibition.

https://www.svenskttenn.com

Form Us With Love

It makes us feel old to note that FUWL celebrates its 20th anniversary (we remember their launch party vividly). Today they are part of the establishment in a very good way. The much-loved studio holds a light to the future of design as an engine for progress, not just furniture for a fair stand. For design week they threw open the doors to their studio, transforming it into ‘The Testing Ground’ - a bistro where they wined and dined guests in celebration, showing a genius new range of lights ‘Catena’ for lighting brand Blond, and a new Nest Club chair for +Halle. Across the city they unveiled a new range of panels for acoustic brand Baux, made from a new material called X-Felt. The design is inspired by Japanese zen gardens and origami, but it’s the material that’s most clever. Firesafe without additives (the fibres mesh is so fine they eliminate oxygen and heat) and because there are no additives they are recyclable. Mega-sized panels (2800 x 1000) make for simple installation and de-installation, too.

https://www.formuswithlove.se/