sixtieth anniversary of Series 7 chair from Fritz Hansen

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BIG - photograph from fritz hansen

To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the design of the Series 7 chair by Arne Jacobsen, Fritz Hansen has commissioned a series of designs based on the form of the chair from seven architects. These architects or architectural partnerships included BIG, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Carlos Ott & Carlos Ponce de Léon, Jun Igarashi Architects, Neri & Hu Design, and Snøhetta.

SNØHETTA

 

NERI & HU

 

Jean Nouvel Design

 

CARLOS OTT and CARLOS PONCE

 

ZAHA HADID

 

St Pauls Blue

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The Frama showroom is in an amazing shop near the church of St Paul in Copenhagen. It was a chemists and ornate ceilings and elaborate woodwork from the 19th century have survived and creates a dramatic display space.

Smaller rooms have been decorated in strong colours to form a backdrop for the furniture and light fittings produced by the team. One of the smaller rooms is in a deep grey blue that was developed with the paint manufacturer Jotun and is used for the walls, the ceiling and the woodwork of doors, architraves and skirting boards with the only other colour and tone from the stripped boards of the floor.

RE-FRAMING DANISH DESIGN

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This exhibition was a collaboration between DANISH™, the web site of the Danish Design & Architecture Initiative that was launched last November, along with FRAME, the design magazine and ten Danish manufacturers.

Two young designers, Sebastian Herkner who studied in Offenbach am Main in Germany, and now has a studio there, and Niek Pulles who trained at the Design Academy in Eindhoven but is now based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, were asked to take ten Danish design works as a starting point and, in any way they saw as appropriate, to make their own assessment or their own interpretation or their own translation of Danish design.

The design works for each of the designers were:

Tray Table, designed by Hans Bølling in 1963 and produced by Brdr. Krüger
Plateau, a new low side table by Søren Rose Studio for DK3
Caravaggio pendant light, by Cecilie Manz with the first version in 2005 for Lightyears
The Montana storage system from the company founded in 1982
Nordic Antique, a range of hand-painted and printed wallpapers by Heidi Zilmer

And there were 5 Chairs:

Series 7™ Chair, by Arne Jacobsen from 1955 and produced by Fritz Hansen
The Tongue Chair, by Arne Jacobsen from 1955 and produced by Howe 
Chair J39, designed by Børge Mogensen in 1947 and produced by Fredericia Furniture 
Safari Chair, designed by Kaare Klint from 1933 and produced by Carl Hansen & Søn
The Fiber Chair, designed by Iskos-Berlin and launched last year for Muuto

 

 

Both designers are building rapidly their own International careers - so both have a clear view of how the design industry is moving or should move forward but also have the perspective of someone within the profession but from neighbouring countries that have their own strong design traditions so they could be more detached in their assessment of Danish design than Danish designers.

Sebastian Herkner focused on the details and the quality of finish found in all the pieces by suspending large magnifying glasses from simple and elegant white-painted metal frameworks in front of the pieces. Each identified a different character or quality that had been observed as the works stood in the studio. Danish buyers demand extremely high production qualities but this is now taken as a given but the magnifying glass forces the viewer to focus in on pieces that, on the whole are so well established and so familiar, they rarely excite comment. In part this view also shows that simplicity is achieved by refining the elements until nothing can be added or taken away without compromising the integrity and beauty of the whole. With such a perfect starting point, or base, it is then the way that the owner uses the pieces that add individuality and personal history.

Niek Pulles took the opposite view, adding to the pieces himself, particularly adding texture but also pattern and colour. This hastened the time process by which families might add to and adapt the pieces to make them their own. One very marked and interesting difference was in the way the two designers approached the wallpaper by Heidi Zilmer. Although the tile version looks like a simple grid of dark lines over a uniform grey representing small square glazed tiles the magnifying glass showed the huge skill of the trompe l’oeil painting of crizzled glaze and irregular grout, here a deeper complexity than the apparent simplicity, whereas Niek Pulles used laser cutting to create new fine geometric patterns through the papers which were then overlaid to emphasise the way the papers themselves are built up through complex layers of paint and gilding.

plywood chairs by Arne Jacobsen

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Chair 3103 from 1957

 

Through the 1950s and 1960s Arne Jacobsen produced a number of chairs using shaped and bent plywood with seat and back in a single piece and usually, though not always, with a frame for legs in tubular metal - the exception being the Grand Prix with legs shaped in wood with a triangular cross section but with the three sides hollowed inwards. 

The flexibility of the plywood, with some give, provided more comfort than a seat and back in solid wood. One problem that had to be resolved was fixing the shell of the seat to the metal frames. In part the quality of the plywood that was admired … that is its relative thinness … meant you could not have fixing screws coming up from underneath and it was not really good to have screws or bolts going down through the seat and into the frame … as you would feel them as you sat on the seat. One solution was to glue an additional disc of wood or ply to the underside of the seat to take fixings and the intersection of the legs or the housings for the legs were covered by a shallow domed plate in metal or plastic. Usually, dampers were fitted towards the edge of the seat to hold the legs in place, reduce the movement slightly and to stop the legs knocking against the underside of the seat as the chair took the weight of the person sitting down.

Because the chairs are light and strong, they are ideal for class rooms, meeting rooms and lecture theatres and most of the chairs stack. However, the simple but elegant shapes of these chairs means that they remain popular for use as dining chairs in family homes.

 

The Ant Chair 1952

Series 7 from 1955

Grand Prix 1957

 

upholstered chairs by Hans Wegner

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Windsor Chair from 1947 with simple loose cushions. The in-cut ring around the top of the back post and the loop on the top corner of the back cushion link this chair to work by Borge Mogensen and also the Colonial Chair that was designed by Ole Wanscher in 1949.

 
 
 

Looking at a large number of chairs that were designed by Hans Wegner, would suggest that he was not interested, primarily, in upholstery but with form and construction: he designed few fully upholstered pieces apart from a cuple large armchairs - including the Papa Chair of 1951 and the Wing Chair of 1960. 

Papa Chair 1951

Wing Chair 1960

 

For desk chairs or dining chairs, padded upholstery was usually simply a loose cushion as with the Windsor Chair of 1947 or was a shaped seat in plywood that was then padded and covered with material or leather - a form he used for the H55 and the CH88 that were both designed in 1955. 

The H55 - a trial design not put into production -and the CH88 also from 1955 but only produced by Carl Hansen since 2014. Details of the seat cushion of the CH88

One of the variations of the Chinese chair design. There is a marked contrast between the stark, simple, thin leather-covered cushion without piping or nails and the deceptively simple but actually highly sophisticated carpentry of the frame of the chair ... note the swan-neck curve of the vertical support of the arm inset from the end of the curved back rail at the top and half-lapped over the side rail of the seat. The shape of the upright support and the curve of the wide but elegant splat of the back are very closely related to the design of the Y or Wishbone Chair.

 

 
 

There are odd exceptions … chairs that had more conventional upholstery ... but these are generally early including the Lattice Chair of 1942 and there was a desk chair with arms that was exhibited at the Cabinetmakers Guild Exhibition of 1944 with the seat cover fixed with brass upholstery nails showing he understood and could do, if he wanted to, what Kaare Klint taught. However, many of the later chairs had either a plain wood or plywood seat and the majority of his chairs have a curved or shaped solid wood back rest. The most common alternative was to form an open frame for the seat or the seat and the back and use interwoven cane or paper cord to provide the support for a person sitting in the chair.

A Lattice Chair from 1942 with details of the more conventional form of upholstered seat. Note the beautiful detail of the shoulder just below the top of the leg that takes the mortice of the front rail of the seat.

 
 

For the most extreme example of the opposite approach to design of upholstered chairs from a contemporary designer then you need only to think of the Egg Chair by Arne Jacobsen that is, apart from its pedestal, 100% upholstery. Or at least everything you see is upholstery because none of the underlying construction is visible … you don’t even know what materials are used for the internal structure.

An Egg Chair designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1959

 
 

Wegner did experiment with much more extreme or at least unusual types of chair that were wide and low and almost cocoon the sitter but primarily play games with the frame - both the Halyard Chair of 1950 and the Circle Chair from 1986 have a large open frame, with the Halyard Chair in metal and with the Circle Chair a hoop of bent wood, strung with rope and then with cushions for comfort or with the Tub Chair of 1954 he played with the adjustable back angle of a deck chair but used for what appears at first to be a conventional upholstered chair.

Halyard Chair from 1950

Circle Chair 1986

Tub Chair 1954 - perhaps the most tailored and curiously, given its wide and flat shape, the most elegant pieces of upholstery designed by Wegner

Tub Chair - detail of the mechanism to alter the angle of the back. The handle-like loop in wood is also the reinforcement for the hinge point of the back and the metal loop is used to help lift the cross bar clear of the metal pegs to lower and raise the back

 

cupboard by Rigmor Andersen

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Rigmor Andersen (1903-1995) trained as an architect and then from 1928 she was one of Kaare Klint’s first students on his furniture design course before working in his studio. She exhibited works at the Cabinetmaker Guild’s annual exhibition. From 1944 through to 1973 she taught at the Royal Academy School of furniture.

This piece, a silver cupboard with drawers, is in Brazilian rosewood with ebony handles and brass hinges and lock and was made by Rud. Rasmussens Snedkerier. It may be the design that was exhibited at the National Museum in Stockholm in 1942 - a copy of that piece was made in 1948 for the Kunstindustrimuseet (now Designmuseum Danmark).

Note the bevelled edges of the doors that sit against the bevelled edge of the side and top boards to give an elegant slim line when the door is closed. This is reminiscent of the display cases designed for the museum by Klint and also made by Rud. Rasmussen. The brass hinges have the simplest possible shape and are set flush and on the inside of the doors the holes for hidden fixing pins are filled with plugs of dark wood for a very subtle decoration.

The drawers have a fine beaded edge - again giving an elegant framing line. Legs are formed from two pieces of wood forming an L shape for strength and given a slight profile at the base. Cross bars or stretchers hold the frame of the legs together allowing the legs to be thinner. The top edge of the leg frame is bevelled and given a set back, again to give it a subtle and elegant emphasis by, in effect, creating a slight shadow below the door.

 

The cupboard is on display in the Designmuseum in their current exhibition Cupboards, cabinets and chests.

Form from Normann Copenhagen

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FORM at northmodern in january

 

The Form range designed by Simon Legald has just been launched by Normann Copenhagen. There are two chair designs in moulded plastic - a straightforward side chair or dining chair and a shell chair - and bar stools in two heights. There are two tables - one square and one a large rectangle and both with linoleum tops.

Stated factually like that the reaction might be “so what?” 

Well then you start adding in the variables or the options available.

All the chairs and stools are made in a choice of six colours and, as with all products from Normann, the colours are striking, very very carefully chosen and, again as with so many Normann ranges now, work well together so, for instance, if you had a set of matched chairs around a kitchen or dining-room table but chose a different colour for kitchen stools and occasionally brought in a chair from another room, say a desk chair, in a different colour, for an extra guest it still all seems to work. And here what is really important is that seats, fittings and table tops all match … almost the same colour is not good enough for Normann.

Then you start looking at the various options for the legs. Tables and chairs and stools all come with either beautifully made and sensibly robust wood legs … and by robust I don’t mean clunky but solid enough to suggest both quality and strength ... or metal legs. In wood there is also a choice between oak or walnut … so picking up on a growing preference for darker timbers for furniture. As chairs and stools can also have legs in powder-coated steel, colour-matched to the seats, if my maths is right, there are 36 possible options for a chair. For the stools with six colours, there are actually two heights offered (65cm and 75cm) so with either steel legs or oak or walnut legs that again makes 36 different possible combinations for colour, height and legs.

 

 

In the space of the show room, which tends to distort scale, the square table looks as if it would serve well as a kitchen table or for a small dining room but actually at 120cm x 120cm it is a good and quite generous and comfortable size and would be a very good main dining table for four. The rectangular table is 95cm wide and 200 long so again generous.

It is as you begin to look at the details of the furniture that you can begin to appreciate the quality of both the design and the manufacture. There are clever metal housings for the legs that fix to the underside of the seats of the stools and chairs or, in a different form but using the same principle, to the underside of the table that are then covered with a plastic sleeve matching the colour of the seat or the table top. The sleeve on the chairs is a curved inverted cone so reduces down to the exact diameter of the top of the leg. It almost appears as if the wooden legs are emerging from the plastic housing and curiously seems much more satisfactory than where, in other plastic chairs, a wood leg fits flush with the underside of the seat using a hidden fitting or using a metal plate that is screwed to the top of the leg and then fixed to the underside of the seat.

The wood legs, are solid and set at an angle, splayed slightly out, so that reinforces the impression of stability but also gives the tables their very elegant profile.

The steel legs for the chairs and stools are obviously thinner but equally well made to form a well-proportioned frame and these give the chairs a very different character ... not worse or better but simply different. The style with metal legs tunes into the interest in designs from the 1960s and 70s and also gives an option that is more minimalist ... more structured and more like an engineered design. The version of the side chair in white with a white steel leg frame is absolutely stunning for a stark, sharp, architectural interior and the soft grey colour combination is pretty stylish. In fact the problem would actually be trying to decide which colour combination you didn't like. This is not hyperbole ... this range of colours and the way they modify the appearance and style of the chair makes it an incredibly flexible piece. That is actually one huge strength with Danish design ... there is a very long tradition of mixing and matching styles and periods within Danish homes. Modern pieces can be used as a point of contrast or as a discussion piece within a traditional, historic room setting, for instance a room with old panelling, or the same piece can be used in an uncompromisingly modern and spot-on-the-minute interior set against glass, steel and concrete. Or anything in between.

Cross bars or cross rails in both the wood option and the steel leg system are at the same height and in the same configuration giving both chairs a strong visual link that makes them clear siblings - variations on a theme.

Plastic for the shells of the seats of the Form chairs and stools is polypropylene and appears to be of an extremely high quality both in the moulding and the finish - all lugs and seams from the moulding process are removed - and the seats are surprisingly thick and reassuringly heavy but with an appropriate flexibility to make them comfortable … there is nothing more uncomfortable or disconcerting than plonking down onto a seat that stolidly refuses to give a millimetre. This flexing, in the Form seats, is achieved by carefully modifying the thickness of the plastic in certain areas - thinner plastic having obviously more flexibility and thicker parts of the shell providing rigidity where it is needed.

Look at the dining chair from above or the shell chair from the side and you will see that the edges of the seat and the profile are beautifully curved - is this technically a compound curve?Whatever it is in terms of geometry, the shape is very beautiful and I don't think I've ever said that about a plastic chair before. And the shell chair has generous proportions so you don’t feel wedged into the seat. The back of the stool curves up to provide an element of support. Well actually, I don't mean support. To be less polite I actually mean that the up-stand stops your backside sliding back to overhang the seat and the upper body slouching forward ... or is that just me that ends up like that on a bar stool?

The tables have cross rails just below the top, so not acting as a frame, and again this makes the profile of the tables much more sophisticated. Presumably this is only possible because of the strength and quality of the engineering of the knuckle joint at the top of the legs. The weaker this joint the further down the cross rails would have to be to stop the legs moving outwards when weight is put on the top.

On the rectangular tables, the rail on the long sides is broken by a central support with the same colour of plastic for the sleeve. Again this actually seems clever and well thought through as it not only gives intermediate support and strength but marks, in a subtle way, the likely place-settings with two people on each long side. As with the chairs, the sides of the table tops, in plan, are a beautifully-constructed gentle curve with generous rounded corners … rather than being straight and angular. Some modern tables look mean and sharp with tightly curved corners and thin table tops but not the Form table.

 

 

The top of the table is covered with linoleum in the same range of colours as the chair shells but the edge is wood and here carefully given an ovolo moulding rather than a crude basic chamfer.

Here I guess is my only criticism of the design … and it is nit picking ... but more than anything I’m just curious about this particular design decision. When you look at the ends of the rectangular table or two opposing ‘ends’ of the square table top you see a series of end grains or blocks along the table edge, all properly moulded and finished, which implies that the whole table top is in block board. In fact it is medium density fibre board with a wooden lip. At the final fence this is, for me, a slight stumble. This is not actually, in design terms, honest - all that form follows function theory stuff - but for me, just for this small detail the integrity of the design is undermined. A fibre-board top is perfectly acceptable … in fact in most ways better than a block-board top … and a wood edge is reasonable and right but why not take the same side grain all the way round?

While you are crouched down, looking at the underside of the table, take a look at the way the leg units are carefully recessed into the underside of the top and not just screwed to the face of the board. Again quality of design and quality of execution.

Publicity material states that the design and development of this range took Simon Legald and the Normann team three years of hard work and focused effort. That effort has achieved results that really do deserve to succeed and the Form Collection certainly sets a new and very very high standard for this type of dining room furniture.

 

the buyer and the designer

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In theory designing, manufacturing and selling something is a very simple sequence - so someone has an idea and produces drawings; a manufacturer makes it; a shop sells it and a buyer buys it. Yup. There you are. It’s simple.

Well actually of course it's not.

To start at the end of the sequence, for the person who buys amazing cutlery or has incredible lighting in their home or buys a beautiful chair, then design and the work of a designer as a job is probably - as far as they can see - all about being creative and imaginative. Vaguely arty. Possibly, if they have thought about it at all, they see the design process as making lots of interesting sketches on thick water-colour paper and with loads of notes and doodles. And maybe involves the odd colour swatch. So even at that superficial level there is an odd mismatch between the buyers perceptions and the reality of the design process.

Or for some buyers ‘design’ … or perhaps I mean Design … is about fashion, so about simply wanting to have the latest and possibly the best chair or table for lots of complex personal reasons … buying a certain brand or a recognised name (or at least a name they vaguely recognise) from the design world to express, in their home, their own status … or their perception of their own status … or the status they would like the world out there to think they have … Or it’s about telling the world about their taste or their ambitions or their income or their need to conform or their need to appear daring and adventurous. For those people information about the actual process of design and manufacturing are probably of no interest.

And that doesn’t begin to address the practical problems any buyer has to consider like whether or not a dining table will fit in their room or look OK with the curtains or extend to take the whole family on the two days a year the family get together or fit with the other furniture that can’t be chucked out at the moment or work with five place settings rather than four or cope with sticky fingers and toy cars during the day and wax from candles and stains from wine glasses in the evening. All incredibly complex.

And that doesn't even take into account that final point when the buyer, having decided it is exactly what they want, has to decide if it is exactly what they need and what they can afford or should spend their money on. 

Not simple at all even at the end of the process when the cutlery, lamp or chair is finished and in the shop and waiting to be bought.

So - to go back to the start of the process - for the designer and that first creativity bit.

Essentially the idea, the concept, is simply the very first stage of the incredibly complex process of turning the ideas and the sketches or, more likely of course the CAD drawings, into a fully realised product.

That process requires an understanding of the intended purpose - so for instance is the posture of a person the same when they are sitting at a desk as when they are sitting at a dining table ... the ergonomics ... so would the same chair design work for both situations? The designer has to have an understanding of the materials to be used - is it right for the job in hand or will it bend or snap with heavy use? - and a designer has to have a very clear understanding of how you cut and fix and finish those materials.

Quite often, I'm sure, the buyer has little understanding that what they have bought is that shape or that size or that form because that was the only way the materials could be shaped and fixed together.

Designers also need an understanding of the context of the piece they are producing - so, for instance, understanding if their design is building deliberately on an established tradition or on the other hand are they trying to produce something truly innovative - or does it have to reflect a brand style, a national style or appeal to the taste and wealth of a specific market or will it try to be broadly international in appeal and is the design to be sold at a particular price point in a specific sector of the market? That obviously effects choice of materials - mdf or seasoned oak, cloth or leather, chrome finish or powder-coated steel - and of course the designer has to have a clear understanding of the manufacturing process for the mass production of their design and, increasingly, an understanding of packaging for transporting the item safely, and packaging to show the piece at its best when it is displayed in the shop or improve how it will look in the on-line catalogue photo. 

A designer won’t get very far in their career if they design something that is impossible to make, or impossible to make at a realistic cost, or is impossible to pack and ship. And they don’t deserve to succeed if they design a knife that won’t cut or a light that gives you an electric shock or a chair that is impossibly uncomfortable.

Broadly all this is the technology part of design that brings that first idea through to its final and successful realisation. And it is, curiously this, the technology side of production, that the consumer, generally, understands and appreciates least.

And my take on this is that if the buyer doesn’t understand the technology - the how and the why of a design - how can they make a rational judgement about the relative merits of the things in the shop when they are trying to choose between the different options on offer and how can they decide if it is good value let alone if it’s well designed and well made or badly designed and badly made? I’m mystified. 

So that's both ends of the "simple" sequence and we haven’t even considered the factory end, transporting, advertising, marketing, sales and after sales servicing …….

just to quote Jonathan Ive on design and manufacturing

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Earlier this month I posted a short quote from Jonathan Ive talking about the design process. The film from Fritz Hansen I posted yesterday about the professional skills and effort needed to bring back into production the Drop Chair reminded me of another comment from Ive in that same interview with Time Magazine. 

Clearly, the team from Fritz Hansen were driven by enthusiasm and conviction and by the professional challenge of this project and would probably only go as far as to claim that it was hard work and not actually painful but that does not diminish the importance of the point and a point that I have tried to emphasise several times in this blog: it is important for designers and manufacturers to explain to consumers the process of design and its importance … both creative or aesthetic design and technical or product design. Ultimately the quality of materials and the quality of production should be fairly obvious once the item is on display in the shop but the meticulous process of production design is less tangible and less obviously justified, to the buyer, looking at the price tag.

Ive was talking about copies of ideas or a specific design by rival companies undercutting the retail price and that does not apply to the Drop Chair where a company is reproducing it’s own earlier designs but if the Drop Chair is a success, and I am sure it will be, then without doubt cheaper imitations or variations will appear. 

At least the film from Fritz Hansen goes a long way towards explaining why bringing back into production pieces from a back catalogue are not necessarily a cheap nor an easy option.

design classic: Eva Trio saucepans by Ole Palsby

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I‘ve used Eva Trio pans for about 15 years, bought at different times from either Illums Bolighus in Copenhagen or from an amazing kitchenware shop in Long Melford in Suffolk that looked like an old Edwardian ironmongers and was piled high with everything any cook could possibly want - even if they didn’t actually know that they needed it until they walked in and saw it. They sold cookware sourced from all over Europe and beyond - a sort of small, more human and more densely packed English cousin of Williams Sonoma.

Anyway! I digress.

Recently I decided I needed another saucepan lid. Not because you can never have enough lids but because somehow I have never got around to buying the right lid for the steamer insert and I’ve got tired of using the frying pan balanced on the top because that was the only thing I have that is the right size. It means the steamer is really only used as a drainer.

Here it might help to explain that Eva Trio saucepans and lids are sold separately so that anyone sensible should be able to work out how many lids they really need - how often is every pan on the stove covered at the same time? - and you can chose either a plain flat stainless-steel lid or a glass lid for those jobs where you need to seal in the steam but also need to keep an eye on what is happening.

Anyway (I digress again) …. as there was no trip to Copenhagen planned and the Suffolk shop seems, unfortunately, to have stopped trading I traipsed around London in what turned out to be a fruitless search. 

At one of the largest cookware shops, getting more and more tired and frustrated, I actually asked someone why they did not stock Eva Trio pans. 

Apparently, I was told, “there is little demand”. 

I always think that this is an odd excuse and, of course, self fulfilling .… how can you sell many of anything if you don’t stock it?

English families, I was informed, fall into one of three types …. most buy sets of cheap pans from a department store; some go for expensive pans if they are endorsed by a TV chef or, for real food snobs, the very heaviest and most expensive French pans are the “must-haves.” This was not only a very large kitchenware shop but also a very expensive kitchenware shop so you can probably guess which sort of pan for which sort of customer they stocked.

Not stocking Eva Trio saucepans is a pity because they are practical, sensible, simple and easy to store and easy to maintain and, above all, again being practical, there are a number of options in terms of finish and material: the different sizes and shapes come in stainless steel or in copper, with an aluminium core, or as white ceramic-coated pans or there is the matt-black anodised Dura line. This is not something to do with customers not being able to make up their minds and buying one of each but so that they can chose pans that are the appropriate material for the way they cook - saucepans that are related in terms of design but different in terms of heating characteristics - with copper using a lower slower heat through the base and steel pans with an aluminium core distributing a quick even heat in a different way. 

Oh yes … and they look good. 

As far as I can see, the only place where they fall short is if you are one of those people who like to multitask because these pans are too light to build biceps as you toss crepes.

Eva Trio saucepans were designed by Ole Palsby and have been in production since 1977 but their simple minimalist design means that, unless you know the design history, it would be very difficult to date them. This really is timeless design. 

Palsby was self taught, starting his working life in business, of the accountant sort, before turning his skills to product design when he was in his early thirties. As well as other kitchenwares for Eva he designed glassware for Rosendahl; a famous spherical vacuum jug for the German company Alfi and a very simple and very beautiful glass carafe with a silver stopper for Georg Jensen. 

In his book on Dansk Design, Thomas Dickson wrote that work by Palsby is “clean, sensible and unsentimental.” 

I stumbled slightly over the choice of the word unsentimental as I read the comment but then realised that actually it is a very good use of the word. Many products for kitchens seem to take their starting point from kitchenwares of a hundred or even two hundred years ago. Nostalgia or a sense of design evolution is great but it is sentimental …. presumably a fancy wrought-iron trivet, for instance, is meant to make you feel not only comforted and reassured but that you are the new Auguste Escoffier or the new Mrs Beeton.

Palsby went back to basics when he designed the range of saucepans for Eva .… he took a step back and started again .… looking not only at specific functions and at aspects of production but he rethought practical things like the form of the thicker base and how it works visually and practically with the thinner metal of the vertical sides - he gave the base plate a neat bevel - and he thought carefully about how the lids would be used and how the pans and lids could be stored. 

The handles are metal rather than plastic so, if you really want, any combination of pan and lid can go into the oven. The handles of casserole and roasting trays are simple metal loops. The saucepan handles are long, made with steel rods bent to an elegant extended U shape with the two ends bent downwards and riveted firmly to the vertical sides of the pan. The handles are long enough to not only keep cool enough to hold but long enough to keep your fingers well away from the hot sides of the pan and away from the flames of a gas hob. Too many saucepans seem to have handles that are too short. 

The saucepans have vertical sides with a simple small flange at the top to take the lid and lids and pans seal well keeping in not only steam but flavour because you can use less water when boiling.

There are relatively standard-looking saucepans in the range but also much taller versions for pasta or for larger quantities and much shallower pans that are great for smaller quantities or to sauté. Many other saucepan sets do a three bears trick with the same design just scaled up or scaled down, except for lid knops which are kept the same size and usually look ridiculous on small pans: the Eva Trio pans come in a more limited range of diameters but a greater range of heights which seems much more sensible and elegant.

The lids themselves are flat and have the same long looped handle but in a thinner gauge of steel rod and they can be stacked in what looks like a toast rack or they can be hung neatly from a line of butcher’s hooks above the stove.

On the glass lids there are the same handles and a steel rim that has the same profile or lip as the solid lids but the oven-proof glass is held in by a circular loop of steel rod matching the handle. 

Because the steel lids are flat and don’t have a central knop, you can stack a pan on top of another pan that is cooking on the hob to keep the contents of the upper one warm but not cooking which is particularly useful if you get your timing wrong or even better as a way of freeing up a hot plate when you suddenly get to that point in the recipe where it says something like “then warm the sauce slowly” and you realise that every hot plate is already in use. If you are a sensible and experienced cook then you probably do a quick double-check of the ingredients list when you start, just as a matter of routine, but when did you ever see a recipe that had a symbol for how many hob plates you will have on the go and how many ladles and stirring spoons you are going to get through?

confession

…. just in case you have read an earlier post, I also have an Iittala roasting pan and a stainless-steel Iittala casserole which are much heavier .… not because I want to work on my biceps but because, when I bake or roast or casserole food, I tend to follow recipes where the pan starts on the hob, sealing meat or softening onions or whatever, but is then moved to the oven for a long slow cook at a lowish temperature. You can do that with the Eva Trio pans as well but the Iittala pan seems to me to be more like a ceramic casserole or rather, the best of both Worlds, like a ceramic casserole but one you can use on the hot plate. Maybe that says more about me than about the pans! 

update

Recently, on a trip to London, I found a selection of Eva Trio cookware at the David Mellor shop on Sloane Square.

Eva Trio

winners of the Lunning Prize

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1951    Hans J. Wegner (Denmark) and Tapio Wirkkala (Finland)

1952    Carl-Axel Acking (Sweden) and Grete Prytz Kittelsen (Norway)

1953    Tias Eckhoff (Norway) and Henning Koppel (Denmark)

1954    Ingeborg Lundin (Sweden) and Jens Harald Quistgaard (Denmark)

1955    Ingrid Dessau (Sweden) and Kaj Franck (Finland)

1956    Jørgen and Nanna Ditzel (Denmark) and Timo Sarpaneva (Finland)

1957    Hermann Bongard (Norway) and Erik Höglund (Sweden)

1958    Poul Kjærholm (Denmark) and Signe Persson-Melin (Sweden)

1959    Arne Jon Jutrem (Norway) and Antti Nurmesniemi (Finland)

1960    Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe (Sweden) and Vibeke Klint (Denmark)

1961    Bertel Gardberg (Finland) and Erik Pløen (Norway)

1962    Hertha Hillfon (Sweden) and Kristian Solmer Vedel (Denmark)

1963    Karin Björquist (Sweden) and Börje Rajalin (Finland)

1964    Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi (Finland) and Bent Gabrielsen (Denmark)

1965    Eli-Marie Johnsen (Norway) and Hans Krondahl (Sweden)

1966    Gunnar Cyrén (Sweden) and Yrjö Kukkapuro (Finland)

1967    Erik Magnussen (Denmark) and Kirsti Skintveit (Norway)

1968    Björn Weckström (Finland) and Ann and Göran Wärff (Sweden)

1969    Helga and Bent Exner (Denmark) and Bo Lindekrantz and Börge Lindau (Sweden)

1970    Kim Naver (Denmark) and Oiva Toikka (Finland)

 

reference:

The Lunning Prize, Catalogue, National Museum of Stockholm, 1986 edited by Helena Dahlbäck-Lutteman

the Family Chairs by Lina Nordqvist

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This group of four different chairs plays with the traditional form of rail-back familiar in England but has various arrangements of the rails forming the back and various patterns of cross rails between the legs. 

They were designed by Lina Nordqvist for Design House Stockholm and work equally well around a kitchen table, used as desk chairs or bedroom chairs or set around a table in a dining room. It is not surprising that they have won a number of design awards and were included in the Autumn Collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.