For decades, the world has been transfixed by the elegant simplicity of Scandinavia’s functionalist designs; with Stockholm being very much at the epicentre, ever since 1930’s famous Stockholm Exhibition. With the city and its designers being every bit as influential today as they were then, we sent Samuel Sweetman – our man in Sweden – to catch up with some of our favourite Swedish designers for an insight into their work and inspirations. First up are the supremely talented, and often featured within these pages, Form Us With Love…
Form Us With Love & Friends at Stockholm Design Week 2011. Photography by Jonas Lindström
We’re huge fans of FUWL, but for the readers’ sake – tell us a little about yourselves – who you are, how you met and what you do:
Well, Form Us With Love is a design studio focusing on furniture and lighting design. We work also with design management and art direction for manufacturing companies in the design sector. The studio was founded in 2005 by Petrus Palmér, Jonas Pettersson and John Löfgren after we’d met during design school in Kalmar in the south of Sweden. Today the studio is located in the center of Stockholm and the studio consists of 5 full time employees working with an international client base stretching from Scandinavia to Italy, Spain and Japan.
Green Heroes, a 2011 exhibition at PUB department store, created in collaboration with the design studio Form Us With Love and garden trend expert Jan Rundgren. Photography by Jonas Lindström
Looking through your work there’s a real cross-disciplined and eclectic mix – how would you describe FUWL’s style?
We don’t see that we have a style and don’t spend any time thinking about it. For us the most important thing is the project at hand. It is true that what we do is very cross-disciplinary and eclectic, but it is always in the design and interiors sector because it is where our passion lies. The style and material choices changes often depends on who we work for and what the project is supposed to achieve; attention, sales, research or just inspiration.
Designing the Fasett family for Westal
Ok, so what are your influences and inspirations – is each project different or do you have a certain way of working together?
Usually our process looks pretty much the same. We greatly value research and inspiration. Often they are linked closely together. When we do research for a new project, visiting a factory or digging into a certain area, something that interests us often comes up. But inspiration is just a tool for solving the problem in an interesting way. We put a lot of time into defining the problem, asking the why’s and what’s. What does the client or project benefit from doing this or that. Lately we have also started working a lot with color research and experimenting, which is a really powerful way of communicating.
FUWL’s Stockholm studio. Photography by Jonas Lindström
So what have you been working on lately – do you have any upcoming exhibitions, launches, openings, etc?
We have around 10-15 ongoing projects. Most of them are due to be launched at the Stockholm Furniture Fair in February or the Salone del Mobile in Milan in April. It’s chairs, tables, benches, lamps and some more conceptual development. During the Stockholm Furniture Fair we will have our exhibition and event concept Form Us With Friends where we invite five clients to make something unique and interesting that we display and celebrate together.
Form Us With Love & Friends at Stockholm Design Week 2010. Photography by Charlie Bennet
Finally, we are constantly inundated with exceptional design and talent out of Stockholm – what’s in the water up there?
Haha, the water is very clean. So clean you can go swimming in the center of Stockholm actually. But the design awareness and interest comes with our heritage, the modernists of the 50’s and a long history of welfare – people had a lot of time of fine-tuning the details of most objects.
The recently unveiled Work Lamp VJ installation, featuring 91 of their iconic Work Lamps. Photography by Miki Anagrius
