---

We bring you our top picks and designers to watch from four shows this spring: Stockholm Furniture Fair, Maison&Objet, northmodern and Imm Cologne

---

Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair
9-13 February
Review by Cate St Hill

For five days in February, 40,000 visitors descend on Stockholmsmässan's 70,000 sq m in search of the best Scandinavian design, and a respite from the snow outside. We were without snow this year, but there was no end of natural, Nordic materials and harmonious, functional designs.

Catching the eye with exquisite craftsmanship, design duo Färg & Blanche presented the Julius chair for family-owned Swedish brand Gärsnäs.

The duo has been experimenting with 'wood tailoring' for several years now, stitching sheets of timber together with a sewing machine, a creative technique that won the Best Product award at the fair in 2014. This time, following intensive research to get the process suitable for mass production, padded fabric has been sewn on to the wood to create modular, curved shields for both a chair and sofa. With no glue holding the pieces together, they can be easily separated and recycled at the end of the product's life.

The Bollo chair by Andreas Engesvik for Fogia amusingly takes its name from the Norwegian designer's favourite dish, spaghetti bolognese.

The voluptuous upholstery, attached to a thin wire frame, gives the chair a curvaceous, fleshy form - especially the salmon-pink version - complete with love-handle-esque armrests.

Plantscape by Maxim Scherbakov

Another unusual form, standing out from other typical Scandinavian designs with their clean lines and smooth volumes (they all start to look the same after a while), was Massproductions' Spark lounger. Inspired by a traditional Swedish kicksled, the steel construction and canvas seat balances on two elegant wooden runners, seemingly ready to take off at any moment.

Also playing a balancing act is Christina Liljenberg Halstrøm's two-legged Georg desk for Danish company Skagerak. Leaning against a wall, the discrete, minimalist design neatly fits into the smallest of spaces, even corridors. Jaime Hayon's Palette Desk for &tradition, meanwhile, makes much more of a statement with its suspended sense of movement.

Spark lounger by Massproductions

Inspired by Alexander Calder's kinetic sculptures, the elongated beanshaped desk sits on thin powder coated steel tubes, with a playful, spinning plate-like tier available in marble or satin polished brass. Says Hayon: 'When I first saw them [Calder's mobiles] I was almost mesmerised. My Palette Desk is an homage to this supremely simple concept of poetry in motion. As I see it, a desk is where we are supposed to sit still and make decisions. And yet, it is also where we find distractions.'

On the lighting front, the pick of the bunch has to be London-based studio Industrial Facility's w152 Busby lamp for Wästberg. Looking a little like a stick man wearing a beanie, the lamp features a flat base with three USB outlets to charge multiple tablets, mobiles and computers.

It can be freestanding, by the bed or on the desk for example, or wall-mounted and fitted into a surface - clever and cute. It was Wästberg's w164 Alto lamp by Dirk Winkel, a tall uplighter that can be dimmed using a disc on the cylindrical base, that won the Fair's Best Product award.

w152 Busby light by Industrial Facility for Wästberg

Away from the more pragmatic concerns of mass production, Greenhouse offered a stage for young, unestablished designers and design schools to let their imaginations run wild. There was Plantscape by Russian designer Maxim Scherbakov, a modernist concrete jungle inspired by post-Soviet architecture that offers a home for plants in between modular building blocks and ventilation shafts.

Croatian furniture designer Luka Jelušic and artist Mladen Ivancic presented An Imaginary Heritage, an intriguing collection of wood and ceramic objects representing food rituals, including an outdoor barrel for smoking fish and gathering people together. Elsewhere, taking inspiration from Canadian landscape and culture - though it could easily have been Scandinavia - Winnipeg-based designer Thom Fougere showed a calm, pared-back collection of furniture, including a vegetable tanned saddle leather chair and a three-legged, solid-ash bar cart.

Bollo chair by Andreas Engesvik for Fogia

For Scandinavians - who make up around 80 per cent of the exhibitors on show - it's all about creating useful, everyday objects, designed to last and age well. They may not design things to look fancy or to show off like the Italians or French might do, but you will find the comfiest armchairs, the neatest desks and the handiest light fittings.