Wick wood

The Wick armchair with wooden legs, designed by Jesper Ståhl & Karl Malmvall for Design House Stockholm .

Wick Chair is a modular and versatile armchair that combines tradition and avant-garde.

“Karl and Jesper placed an old basket in front of me and explained that that was what they had in mind,” says Anders Färdig. "I was practically at sea!"

The intention was never to produce a basket, but the article presented by the designers explains the origins of the Wick chair and the values it conveys. The basket of wood chips is the kind we recognized from his daughter Brita's romantic watercolor by Swedish artist Carl Larsson, which has become an emblem of what Christmas is supposed to be like in Sweden. At the time it was painted, it was a modern interpretation of tradition. The fact that the Wick chair is braided similarly to the wood chip basket indicates the design tradition from which it springs, but the braiding can equally be seen as one aspect of the designers' elegant solution to a difficult practical problem. .

" Hay limits to how much wood can be bent," explains Karl Malmvall. "That's why we decided on braiding."

This no-nonsense and pragmatic approach has been inherited directly from the artisan tradition of the countryside, but it is also a solution that gives the Wick chair its unique shape. Another challenge Malmvall and Ståhl faced was how to braid the seat without covering everything with glue.

"This was our last challenge," explains Jesper Ståhl. "Combining the back and the seat without spreading glue especially was not difficult in itself, but it also had to work on a production line."

A positive effect of interweaving is that at the point where the pieces of wood fit together, they can be glued on both sides. True, Jesper Ståhl and Karl Malmvall had simplified the form to its absolute essence, so that the Wick chair only has one interlocking element on each side, but the form has many intentional functional aspects. It's the tests and insights that you follow that have made working with laminated wood so rewarding.

“The chair takes on a strength and tension that cannot be achieved with solid wood,” explains Karl Malmvall.

Material: Seat: oak veneer (natural wood or black) / ash wood (beige).

Legs: solid wood

Dimensions: 57x50x75cm