Milan 2014: Swedish studio Claesson Koivisto Rune has created a modular chandelier, with strings of ovoid-shaped lights influenced by the shape of grapes hanging on a vine.
Claesson Koivisto Rune‘s Grappa chandelier for London company Wonderglass comprises glass diffusers produced in two slightly different lengths. These can be arranged along a central stem to create strings of glowing beads.
“Like a bunch of grapes on a vine, nature creates beauty through variation within repetition,” said the designers. “The bunch consists of a number of the same-shaped grapes but each grape varies slightly in size to the next.”
“With this mental image in mind, we have developed a concept based on stacking a series of lampshades to create columns of various lengths,” they added.
Influenced by the spectacular chandeliers that hang in palaces and grand buildings, the designers wanted to develop a modular product that can be used to create large installations as well as smaller lighting fixtures.
Combining the two elements in various configurations results in a multitude of subtly different installations that can be adapted to suit specific spaces.
The translucent glass shades diffuse light from rows of LED bulbs fixed to the surface of a transparent column and the LEDs can also emit coloured light if desired.
Installing the Grappa chandelier
Wonderglass uses traditional glass-blowing facilities in Venice to produce the elements of its chandeliers. The brand also launched designs by Zaha Hadid and John Pawson at its Milan exhibition last week.
Milan 2014: Swedish design studio Claesson Koivisto Rune has launched a range of chairs with winged backrests designed to create a “room within a room” in Milan this week.
The Radar Easy chair collection was created for the Italian furniture company Casamania and consists of four pieces, the largest being a chair with a winged back rest designed to create a “radar” effect between two people facing each other.
“The backs create different levels of privacy like a room-within-a-room,” Mårten Claesson from Claesson Koivisto Rune told Dezeen. “The largest and widest back also creates a personal space and silence for the sitter. In a facing pair, your conversation is contained between the two “radars”.”
Each chair has been cast into an upholstered foam-frame with an optional swivel base. They come in various colours and fabrics – including leather – depending on the client’s preferences.
Mårten Claesson said the chairs were “not limited for contract use” and could be used in either a home or an office, in breakout rooms or lobbies.
Product development concept of the Radar Easy chair collection
They are on show in Hall 16 Stand D 39 in Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan this week.
Rounded pentagons feature in all of the designs from Claesson Koivisto Rune‘s Five range for Matsuso T, a new brand curated by Japanese designer Jin Kuramoto.
“We live in a world of five elements that we experience through our five senses,” said the studio’s cofounder Mårten Claesson. “Five is gently odd. Five is not too many. Five is beautiful.”
The maple wood collection includes an armchair, a stool, dining and coffee tables, a coat stand, a clothes rail and a bench, each with softened corners.
“We developed a shape that combines a circle with a pentagon,” Claesson explained. “The chair, the table, the clothes rail and the other members of the Five family all share this iconic shape.”
Legs equally spaced at the corners of table tops and seats are denoted by indentations on the surfaces.
Some items are available with sections or just the dents coloured red. The chairs also come entirely in the same bright shade.
The chairs still have four legs, two of which are angled to meet the ends of the curved element that forms the arms and back. A fifth vertical strut is used to brace this piece in the centre.
One of the legs of a stool is extended through the seat to form a coat stand, with angled branches attached to the pole for storing garments.
A clothes rail is formed from a simple wooden beam with ends that gently point upward, which hangs from the ceiling on thin red strings.
The Five range will be unveiled at the Stockholm Furniture and Lighting Fair, which opens on 4 February as part of Stockholm Design Week.
Swedish design studio Claesson Koivisto Rune will present a modular table system with plug sockets within the structure during Stockholm Design Week next month (+ slideshow).
Designed for Swedish furniture brand Offecct, the Xtra Large table can be extended to create a giant workspace. Claesson Koivisto Rune designed the system so a single piece of furniture could be used to create a flexible office space.
The table can be expanded over time and once it gets to certain size it can be used by employees working independently at one end while a meeting is held at the other.
“We wanted to create a hybrid between a meeting table and a writing desk; a table big enough to work undisturbed with your laptop but still be able to start up a conversation with someone sitting opposite,” said studio co-founder Eero Koivisto. “Even if there is a meeting taking place at the far end of the table.”
The table surface of each module is held up by two chunky cylindrical legs and braced by a square beam, which contains power sockets at each end. Electric wiring runs through the beams and down through the legs to keep the workspace free of cables.
“We have maximised a regular table with all the functions demanded in a modern office today,” said Koivisto. “You could say that this table is the equivalent of a Hercules aeroplane.”
Swedish studio Claesson Koivisto Rune has fitted out this Japanese showroom selling European ceramics using pale wooden display furniture and potted plants (+ slideshow).
Swedish architects Claesson Koivisto Rune designed the interior for Ceramika’s flagship store in the city of Matsumoto in the mountainous Nagano Prefecture.
The retail space in a former city hall by the river was stripped out and then fitted with neutral painted walls, timber flooring and a range of custom-designed wooden furniture.
“The colours and materials of the interior were chosen to harmonise with the porcelain, which is mostly blue and white,” said the architects.
The showroom is laid out in a simple grid, with display units positioned in rows and shelving on the walls. “The aim was to create a space which was strict yet humble,” the architects explained.
The display tables comprise wooden frames with side panels that can be removed and opened up to provide extra shelving below, and grey curtains can be used to divide the space.
Ceramika ceramic tableware showroom, shop and cafe
The Ceramika showroom is located in Matsumoto in the mountainous Nagano Prefecture, some 200 km northwest of Tokyo. Matsumoto is not a very big city, but it is a centre of traditional crafts, such as wood, lacquerware and fabric. Oddly perhaps then that the cups and plates and bowls at Ceramika are European and not Japanese. But this is what modern Japan is about. Opened up to the world while never deviating from the very strong Japanese heritage of aesthetics and quality.
In line with these principles was the commission to design the Ceramika flagship store given to the Swedish architects Claesson Koivisto Rune – undeniably Scandinavians, but well accustomed to Japan.
Ceramika is represented with shops in every major city throughout Japan and through mail order and online business, but Matsumoto is the home town.
The Ceramika showroom is located in the city centre in a former City Hall building along the Matsumoto river. The space was completely stripped and the new interior is deliberately simple but with meticulously refined details. The layout is on a strict repetitive grid.
The colours and materials of the interior were chosen to harmonise with the porcelain which is mostly blue and white.
The project was a fruitful collaboration between the architect and the client. The client and owner of the Ceramika showroom, Mr. Hiroshi Arai, took a personal pride in attending to the quality and execution of every detail in the project.
The wood furniture was designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune and manufactured by carpenter master Hoshino-san. This made it possible to use smaller proportions and have a much higher degree of refinement, than usually in a project like this.
Many of the pieces in the project was designed especially by Claesson Koivisto Rune and manufactured locally in Japan. Such as the display furniture, tables and clothes hangers. Other pieces also designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune were produced by manufacturers such as Almedahls, David design, Tacchini, and Wästberg.
The aim was to create a space which was strict, yet humble. As an enhancing frame for the ceramic objects at display and a section of illustrated children’s books from around the world!
And – last but not least – the small cafe with both indoors and outdoors seating.
Named Medusa, Chinita and Bellota, the three designs are meant to resemble jellyfish, ladybirds and acorns.
The small and large jellyfish lamps feature woven shades with long wicker tentacles left dangling below to disguise three thin metal legs.
The designers also created small, medium and large rounded floor lamps with four legs teased out from the corners of each one, which they liken to ladybirds.
The third product in the range is an acorn-shaped pendant, which is available in three sizes.
The wicker lamps will be presented at design show designjunction at The Sorting Office, 21-31 New Oxford Street, WC1A 1BA until 22 September as part of London Design Festival.
Here’s some more information from Claesson Koivisto Rune:
We are impressed by the achievements of the young team at Made in Mimbre. They have succeeded in creating and manufacturing their beautiful lighting collection locally. Not only that, their whole ethos of employing local artisans to create contemporary objects in a professional context and in so doing preserve their wicker weaving techniques makes us profoundly happy to be a part of.
Not only do we see great potential and intrinsic value in the handicraft of their products, the quality of the light from within their lamps is fantastically warm and atmospheric. Collaborating with Made in Mimbre on our first collection has been a pleasure and a joy!
In honour of the origins of the manufacturer we have chosen to give the lamp designs Spanish names: Medusa, Chinita and Bellota.
The Medusa lamps, with their oval-shaped lampshades, appear to balance on numerous thin, spindly supports. Rather than trimming the excess lengths of wicker, as is usually done, we have kept them and hidden three, thin metal legs amongst them. The resulting designs reminded us of jellyfish, floating, with their many trailing tendrils.
Almost as if they have been nipped and then pulled, four ‘feet’ appear to have been stretched from the bottom edge of the Chinita lamps. We think that the gesture results in a series of lamps with a cute, creature-like character. Like small, friendly bugs. Like ladybird bugs, for example.
The Bellota suspension lamps are two, similar forms combined to make a whole. Yet there is a clear division between the two. In keeping with the nature theme, the inspiration for the BELLOTA design is derived from the distinctive form of the acorn, where one form can be seen to partially ‘cover’ the other.
Wooden walls fade from dark red to yellow ochre on the exterior of this house that curves around an oak tree in Sollentuna, Sweden, by architecture and design studio Claesson Koivisto Rune (+ slideshow).
The architects planned a two-storey building with a curved L-shape, creating enough space for the client’s family without disturbing the old tree and without approaching the boundaries of the site too closely.
“The curved L-shape stems completely out of the zoning regulations,” explains Claesson Koivisto Rune. “The actual bend gives the house an interior spatial flow that would have been broken if we’d chosen a sharp corner.”
Timber cladding is arranged vertically around the facade and are painted with different shades of traditional Falu Rödfärg paint to create the gradient.
A double-height living room is positioned at one end of the house and features a large floor-to-ceiling window, while the roof overhead slopes up gradually towards the first floor.
A kitchen and dining room forms the centre of the plan. A dark red bookcase curves around the side of the room, concealing a set of generously proportioned stairs that lead to bedrooms on the first floor.
“With its slow climb, the staircase gives you a feeling of ‘proceeding’ rather than walking between levels,” say the architects.
A study is also located on this upper floor and offers a balcony overlooking the living room.
Marble covers the floors at the house’s entrance, while the bathroom floors and walls are lined with patterned green ceramics designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune for tile brand Marrakech Design.
Read on for more information from Claesson Koivisto Rune:
Fagerström House
The client had split his garden city plot in two and moved the old house to the one. The other had a more embedded position, including a big old oak tree in the middle.
The gross building allowance had to be fully exploited in order to create a large enough home for the growing family. The stipulated distance to the property line of course limited the positioning from the sides, while the desire to preserve the old oak tree blocked the middle.
The curved L-shape stems completely out of the zoning regulations. The actual bend gives the house an interior spatial flow that would have been broken if we’d chosen a sharp corner. The curving of course also makes for an iconic and sculptural exterior – something that the client specifically requested.
Another distinctive feature is the facade colour. Vertical boards are painted in different Falun red shades. An irregular transition from ocher (wide boards) to dark red (narrow boards) happens from the bedroom end to the living room end. The inspiration for the colour mixture was taken from the Swedish children’s book ‘Where’s the Tall Uncle’s Hat?’.
The house has two floors in its tall end. That’s where you find bedrooms etcetera. In the second lower end, the upper floor terminates with a balcony facing the interior living room with its high ceilings. The roof has a diagonal, pitch; from one end to the other and also backwards. This skews the house’s gables but also makes for the constant changing of room geometry as one moves through the house.
The house’s waistline houses the kitchen and, behind a bookcase, stairs. The kitchen thus is very much open while the stairs up to the more private spaces are more to the side. With its slow climb, the stairs gives a you a feeling of ‘proceeding’ rather than walking between levels.
All openings/glazing is carefully placed so that visibility from neighbours is avoided. This also creates a feeling that the house is located in a place far more sparsely populated than the area in reality is. As if it was just the house and the outdoors.
Instead of a larger number of conventional windows, the remaining placements are generously glazed. For example, the living room is completely glazed toward a conservatory. As an outside extension of the living room.
The entrance floor is made of Carrara marble. The tiles are laid perpendicular to the main facade, even where the room bends (like a fan). An integrated blood-red bookcase and staircase flows into an equally blood-red wood floor upstairs. The bathrooms are tiled (floor, walls and ceiling) with different patterns from Marrakech Design’s collection by Claesson Koivisto Rune.
We thought of the house as if it designed itself; that it was neither particularly strange or extreme. But everyone else evidently did not agree. When the house was finished or nearly finished three cars drove into the concrete blocks placed on the street right outside to prevent high speed in the area. Three drivers, three different occasions, who could not keep their eyes on the road.
Swedish design studio Claesson Koivisto Rune has come up with a stove for the developing world that uses a two-thirds less wood than a traditional cooking fire (+ movies + slideshow).
The Baker Cookstove was designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune for Top Third Ventures, a company set up in 2011 to sell stoves to low-income households in developing countries, with the aim of improving the health of users and lowering carbon dioxide emissions.
In countries like Kenya, where the Baker Cookstove is being launched first, cooking is traditionally done on a three-stone fire – an open fire over which a pot is balanced on three rocks.
This inefficient method not only requires lots of firewood, resulting in children being sent long distances to fetch wood instead of attending school, but also creates a large amount of lung-damaging smoke.
Claesson Koivisto Rune came up with a compact stove made from recycled aluminium that requires only a third of the amount of wood normally used for a three-stone fire.
Diagram of stove
Tests at the University of Nairobi showed the Baker Cookstove achieved a 56% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and a 38% reduction in smoke particles.
The shape of the stove and its bright colours are intended to resemble traditional African cookware.
“As designers we need to put the same effort into an African stove as if we were designing an Italian sports car,” said the designers.
Above: movie shows Claesson Koivisto Rune’s design process
The majority of women in the developing world prepare food on a technology called a three-stone fire. It is basically three rocks that support a pot with an open fire in the middle. This cooking method is very inefficient and leads to many environmental and health problems, one very real side effect being that children are denied education and futures because they are sent to collect firewood, wood that every day is founder at further distances. The walk takes all day and leaves no time for school.
However, since the three-stone method has been a tradition for thousand of years, a new stove must allow the user to keep their way of life intact to be successful. The solution is to make a stove that burns wood, but as efficiently as possible.
The design approach has really been the same as with any design project. Design is about solutions – function, usability, unification – and about adding an immaterial – humane, aesthetic, iconic – dimension.
You can still cook over burning wood, but with the Baker stove you need only one third of the wood of before. In numbers from tests at the University of Nairobi the Baker Cookstove achieve a 56% reduction in CO and 38% reduction in particulate matter.
Local methods of cooking, tools and containers were studied as inspiration and to gain cultural insight. As a result the final shape of the Baker Cookstove as well as its strong colours are reminiscent of traditional African cookware.
The goal was to design a subtly iconic object. A functionalistic design, yet recognisable and memorable. The road up to the final incarnation has turned several times after research and performance optimisation changed the technical parameters. There are good reasons for each and every design choice, like the use of recycled aluminium and the trapezoid folding that correspond to weight, heat transmission, sturdiness etcetera.
The somewhat eye-opening obvious fact is that we all have an emotional relationship with our objects. The psychology is no different if you have less or have it all; if you relate to a basic cookstove in Africa or a high performance car in the streets of Europe. To hand out functioning but crude and cheap cooking tools to “the poor” is commendable but condescending. Would I myself really appreciate a cheap and ugly tool offered to me because it “works and improves my life”? Maybe that’s not good enough. As designers we need to put the same effort into an African stove as were we designing an Italian sports car.
The Baker stove project has inspired us not for the prospect of making money, not for the design itself, but for the extraordinary satisfaction of actually making a tangible, positive difference in many people’s lives and for the environment. And eventually, if the end users will come to tell us that they are proud to own this stove, our day is made.
Design: Claesson Koivisto Rune (through Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto, Ola Rune, Louise Bahrton and Patrick Coen) Producer: Top Third Ventures (through Lucas Belenky and Björn Hammar) Manufacturing: Kenya (locally)
The armrests of these chairs by Swedish designers Claesson Koivisto Rune reach out as though asking for a hug.
The Hug range by Claesson Koivisto Rune for Italian brand Arflex features deep, thin arms that angle upwards and outwards.
“The friendly and welcoming gesture, seen most clearly in the ‘open-armed’ position of the armrests, is meant as a universal invitation, saying ‘come, sit with me a while and I’ll put you at ease,'” say the designers.
The upholstered seat, backrest and arms sit on a wooden plinth supported by legs in a contrasting colour.
The Hug collection includes a dining chair, a lower side chair and a high-backed club chair that’s more enclosed.
Milan 2013:top-heavy chairs by Swedish studio Claesson Koivisto Rune are currently on show at Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile.
Inspired by the block colours and simple shapes found in the work of American minimalist artist Ellsworth Kelly, Claesson Koivisto Rune has upholstered the pair of padded Kelly chairs in vivid tones.
The rounded seat and back of the first chair appear to be formed from one section that is pinched at the place where they join.
A giant square back with rounded corners and a rectangular seat of the same width make up the larger chair.
Designed for Italian furniture brand Tacchini, both models have thin metal legs and bracing that look like they rest lightly against each other.
The legs of the bigger chair are stabilised with two crossed rods at the back, while the smaller seat has a single bar that spans beneath the seat to join the secondary struts on each side.
Inspiration does not follow straight lines. Only in hindsight does it appear logical. But one thing is true: Inspiration is inspirational.
One inspired artist is American Ellsworth Kelly. And that inspired us.
But it takes more to create inspired product design than an inspired Swedish designer. It takes two to play. This crazy, weird, childish, beautiful, wonderful play-doh-graphic universe is just the kind of inspiration that you can only develop into serious furniture together with an inspired manufacturer. And we’re so happy we’ve got Tacchini, the Italian friend willing to play.
It’s not art, it’s just design. But that’s what we do. With joy. Enjoy.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
