(**Åke Axelsson** image: Martin Brusewitz).

Most Swedes have interacted with the furniture and interior architecture of Åke Axelsson, even if they do not know it. Axelsson, who turned 90 earlier this year, has had a prolific career spanning eight decades. He has designed more than 200 chairs, which sit in the Swedish parliament, the Royal Palace, and museums, libraries and restaurants across the country.

Yet Axelsson remains almost unheard of outside Northern Europe. “I think the main reason he is not so well-known outside Scandinavia,” says the editor and curator Hanna Nova Beatrice, “is because he’s always worked as an interior architect, mainly in Sweden. His furniture has always been strongly connected to that.”

Beatrice is the curator of Talking to Åke, a new exhibition at Sven-Harry's Konstmuseum (itself an Axelsson interior project). Opened during Stockholm Design Week in February 2022, the show combines a survey of Axelsson’s career, accompanied by works and installations from younger Swedish designers and studios executed in dialogue with Axelsson. “We wanted to bring in other voices,” explains Beatrice, “because we wanted to create discussions and show the differences.”

There are aspects of Axelsson’s approach that seem remnants of a different time. Before studying interior architecture in Stockholm, Axelsson trained as a cabinet maker and carpentry remains central to his work – something comparatively rare within contemporary design. “He’s very frustrated with the way schooling has developed and become more niche,” recounts Beatrice. “An architect now does one thing, a carpenter something else, instead of learning the whole scope of the trade.” Axelsson’s career, by contrast, blossomed during Sweden’s post-war public construction boom, which gave him an opportunity to take a holistic approach. He created entire interior schemes from scratch: a freedom rarely accorded to today’s designers.

Yet Axelsson is far from a relic. Some of his chairs, says Beatrice, “could have been made by a young designer today trying to come up with something very minimalistic.” He has remained active well into the 21st century and, in 2003, he and his family part-purchased Gärsnäs, a struggling furniture factory. Under Axelsson's leadership, together with that of his daughter and son-in-law Anna and Dag Klockby, Gärsnäs has reinvented itself as a significant Swedish manufacturer. More recently, Axelsson set up his own e-retailing platform selling flat-pack furniture that can be posted directly to customers from his workshop. “I think he was around 85 at the time”, Beatrice remarks.

Ventures such as this show how Axelsson's ethos is attuned to the present moment. His furniture designs, for instance, aspired to sustainability long before environmental concerns became mainstream in design. “His work has always used as little material as possible,” explains Nova Beatrice. “There is never anything there that’s not there for a reason, reducing the waste involved in the creation of his furniture.” The 2019 edition of his 2013 Nomad chairs, for example, contain neither glue nor screws – Axelsson has described the series, minimalist to the extreme, as “ecological anti design”.

This approach towards design is intended to ensure longevity, with a number of his restaurant interiors having remained in place for two-and-a-half decades. “He was really ahead of his time,” continues Beatrice. “[This approach] reflects where we are today in design, but he’s worked like that since the 60s.” In 1976, Axelsson provided the furniture section of Ararat, an interdisciplinary exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet that preempted many of today’s environmental concerns. The low-seated chairs he developed for the exhibition, also known as Ararat, are still available today.

By placing Axelsson alongside younger designers, Beatrice has helped foster some fruitful connections. David Ericsson is also a designer-carpenter with a strict, minimalist aesthetic. For the exhibition he created a Windsor chair so minimal that it has stopped resembling a Windsor chair. Färg & Blanche’s exuberant, experimental chairs, meanwhile, may be aesthetically divorced from Axelsson’s more spartan style, but have found a commonality in their hands-on, atelier-based approach. Axelsson and designer Emma Olbers connected over a shared interest in avoiding waste, and worked together on the resource-efficient Tillsammans [Together] chair, connected with discarded tractor screws. And Stockholm-based studio Folkform collaborated with Axelsson on a chair based on his own 1978 reinterpretation of Marcel Breuer’s Ti3a.

For Beatrice, corralling Axelsson’s work was not without its hurdles — some of them generated by the designer himself. “To do an exhibition with Åke is to reduce,” she explains, citing the sheer breadth and volume of his work. “Until the day before the exhibition he was asking to put one more chair in.” Beatrice also recount discovering one chair in the Axelsson’s garage that he disliked. “He felt it was the least practical chair,” she remembers. “I had to wait a few weeks before he said yes to showing it.”

By focusing on Axelsson’s ingrained commitment to sustainability and his correspondences with younger generations, the show has refreshed his legacy. “We've grown up with Åke's interiors in Sweden,” says Beatrice, “he's always been present. So we don't think of him as progressive or contemporary. But I think when you walk through the exhibition, you can see his work as not just that of a 90-year old, famous Swedish interior architect, but also a super progressive designer and architect.”

Words Joe Lloyd

Talking to Åke is on display at Stockholm’s Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum until 27 March 2022. The show is a collaboration between Sven-Harrys and Stockholm Design Week.

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