Factory fun: Nordic students create innovative products for Lammhults

Swedish brand Lammhults appears to have found the answer to shaping the designers of tomorrow with their two-year-long project, X-WORKS 2.0.

Located in the southern Swedish city of Lammhult, the eponymous brand has taken pride in their Nordic craft since 1945. For this project, five students were invited to work on their skills in the brand's Småland factory, immersing them in 60 years of technique, rigour and tradition. Taking place over the course of a year, the five different designers each created a meticulous furniture piece to show during the annual Stockholm Furniture Fair last month.

The students were chosen from a pool of 26 at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. Julia Prytz, Andrés Nilson, Tuva Rivedal Tjugen, Vilde Øritsland Houge and Therese Hallberg all devised their products with the help of Lammhults' craftsmen, amalgamating the brand's style with their own unique aesthetics. The aim was to ‘find new talent, and to inject new blood into Lammhults’ solid design tradition’, the organisers explained.

All of the young talents bought a strong sense of personal vision to the table. For instance, Nilson used to be a professional athlete; Øritsland Houge is inspired by Norwegian designers Vera & Kyte; Rivedal Tjuge is a lover of nature; and Hallberg sees design as meditation and communication. By delving into their own worlds, Lammhults became intimately involved with their designs from start to finish.

The result is a broad range of projects, the innovation therein signalling a new direction for the brand via the mix of eclectic benches, room dividers and waste solutions. In particular, Öritsland Houge’s seesaw-inspired rocking seats and tables, and Hallberg’s trolley on wheels, were mutually playful concepts both rendered in Lammhults' typically fine tubular metal. Meanwhile, Prytz’s sculptural room divider and tables adopt a decoratively artistic yet strikingly abstract edge.

X-WORKS 2.0 explores an experimental side to Lammhults – steering away from a corporate market into an exciting next-gen design revolution.