Dark days, hot stuff: Stockholm Report 2025

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Meet the highlights and bright lights of this year’s Stockholm Design Week.

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By string furniture, BAUX, Fogia and

March 7, 2025 | 03:00 am CUT

Stockholm Design Week 2025’s highlights were many, including artist and glassblower Fredrik Nielsen’s creative process. Photo: Simon Keane-Cowell

There’s a word for it in French. ‘Joli-laid’. Meaning unconventionally attractive. (Literally ‘pretty-ugly’.) It comes to mind as Note Design Studio's Kristoffer Fagerström announces to a gaggle of design journalists (myself included) that ‘our products always have to be 10% ugly’. The location is the Swedish multidisciplinary design collective’s studio, the occasion Stockholm Design Week. Intended to provoke, the desired effect is achieved, as laughter ripples through the room. Naturally, ugly has little business here. Or indeed in Stockholm, which, despite bone-chilling February temperatures, never fails, with its archipelagic topography and Gustavian Style architecture, to delight.

‘Our products always have to be 10% ugly’

What Fagerström means is, in order to keep design interesting, it should never be too perfect. A fly in the ointment is welcome to keep things crackling. ‘We want to find the point where the air is vibrating,’ explains Fagerström. And good vibrations have been spreading recently as Note, who earned their chops in interiors, products and visual communication, have recently completed their first architectural build – a pine house in the mountainous region of Ottsjö. ‘We wanted to do the whole thing ourselves,’ says Johannes Carlström. ‘We’ve often asked ourselves in the past why the architect has decided to stick a pillar somewhere,’ he jokes.

Note Design Studio have completed their first architectural project, a pine house in Ottsjö surrounded by nature. Photos: Erik Lefvander

Doing it yourself is on full display at Faye Toogood’s special exhibition at the Stockholm Furniture Fair. Entitled ‘Manufracture’ and featuring a collection of maquettes from the Guest of Honour’s private archive, the show focuses on the maker and their making. An exercise in demystifying the creative process, Toogood describes it as ‘a space dedicated to the hands of craft’.

The space doubles as a bar, replete with negroni on tap (serviced by a pink-terrazzo handle, of course)

At the Bobo showroom across town, meanwhile, glassware, at times heart-stoppingly filigree, exudes the virtuosity of handwork – and mouthwork. Mouth-blown and lead-free, the products are framed by a carefully considered architectural-interior scheme by local Gustav Winsth, whose reduced, yet materially warm, design dialogues neatly with the products on display. And drunk from. The space doubles as a bar, replete with negroni on tap (serviced by a pink-terrazzo handle, of course).

The ‘Manufracture’ exhibition at the Stockholm Furniture Fair featured a collection of Faye Toogood maquettes (top) and Gustav Winsth’s (middle) Bobo showroom (bottom) served as both a space for product display and a bar. (Photo top: Simon Keane-Cowell)

Hospitality is built into Swedish brand Dusty Deco, the love child of partners in design, business and life Edin and Lina Kjellvertz. Originally a curated platform for unique vintage furniture sourced from flea markets all over the world, they launched, after a decade, their own eclectic label, creating expressive, storytelling-rich pieces that go their own way. Their latest collaboration is with architecture and design office Studio Stockholm, which sees the launch of a small family of armchairs called ‘Decadent’. As the name suggests, we’re talking a fulsomely upholstered club-chair typology that’s one half jazz-club nostalgia, one half Coco Chanel’s Place Vendôme apartment.

Edin and Lina Kjellvertz (top), founders of Swedish brand Dusty Deco, debuted their Decadent armchair in collaboration with Studio Stockholm (bottom)

Much more rational in design language is String Furniture’s presentation, back at the fair. Like catnip to architects, their products, which include the introduction of a new colour – a dark, warm grey designed to complement the natural wood elements of its iconic storage and display system – speak spatial. Along with Pira G2 (the space-dividing shelving system first designed in 1955 by Swedish architect Olle Pira and rebooted a couple of years ago thanks to Anna von Schewen and Björn Dahlström) and Center Center (a bent-metal and eminently configurable storage system by Stockholm-based studio Form Us With Love) this is micro-architecture in action.

The leather-clad Swede, Fredrik Nielsen, is like the Jimi Hendrix of glass

Form Us With Love are also present in their collaboration with BAUX, the acoustic experts, who’ve launched X-FELT, a new collection of large-format, high-performance sound-managing elements. Made from ultra-fine polyester fibres sourced from GRS-certified PET, and, uniquely on the market, eschewing the need for undesirable fire-retardent treatments, the panels and tiles feature ultra-graphic, precision-cut patterns that Form Us With Love co-founder John Löfgren describes as ‘zenseful’ (get it?), such is their simplicity and harmony.

Form Us With Love’s products included their storage system, Center Center, for String Furniture (top) and their new X-FELT acoustic panels for BAUX. (Photo bottom: Matthias Södermark)

Simplicity is on show, too, at Fogia’s Stockholm HQ – an adapted steam-engine shop for the city’s former shipbuilding industry – but one which belies a deep design consideration. ‘It provides a mechanical comfort, not one simply achieved through various layers of foam’, respected Norwegian designer Andreas Engesvik says of this latest collaboration with the Swedish furniture manufacturer. Made in Fogia’s own factory and hitting on that sweet spot between just enough material usage and a rich level of comfort that the brand has come to be known for, ‘Pico’ possesses a physical lightness (weighing in at just 12.3 kg) that makes it deceptively mobile.

Stockholm Design Week 2025 featured Fogia’s latest collaboration with Andreas Engesvik (top) and provided a glimpse into Frederik Nielsen’s design approach (Photo bottom: Daniel Larsson)

It’s hard to select a single highlight when you’re on a press trip. It’s like picking your favourite child. But for sheer star quality, I’m nominating artist and glassblower Fredrik Nielsen. This man is hot. Literally. With furnaces burning, graffiti covering the walls and DJ-sounds pumping at his Stockholm atelier, the leather-clad Swede is like the Jimi Hendrix of glass, slashing, pinching, deforming and reforming his fluid-like creations in a kinetic show that mesmerises. Burn, baby, burn!

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