Based in Sweden between Gothenburg and Stockholm, Snickeriet is a design studio exploring different approaches to traditional woodworking. Marking five years since its founding, the studio has launched a new collection of furniture designs, featuring five pieces that demonstrate its diverse approach to its craft.
Led by designer Karl-Johan Hjerling, cabinet maker Hannu Hietamäki and head of studio Robert Zillen, Snickeriet’s previous output had consisted of furniture that combined a minimal palette of colours and materials with a richness of details, thanks to the attention to artisanal techniques at the core of the studio’s practice.
This new collection includes a stool, shelving, a coffee table and a cabinet, each defined by distinctive forms and each completely different. Every piece in this collection is a case study in craft exploration.
Take the ‘Strata’ cabinet, an imposing piece of furniture created by manipulating wood-grain patterns and inspired by wood intarsia and the appearance of sedimentary rocks. Or see the essential construction of the ‘Posit’ table, simply consisting of a clear glass top effortlessly placed onto a cedar cube. Made of Douglas fir, the ‘Trilit’ stool is fashioned like a ‘vivacious exaggeration of a simple wood joint, naively distorting a rational solution into a complex craft’. The piece’s artisanal complexity is concealed by the playful, inflated forms of its parts.
The final two pieces look further into the possibilities of material and structural experimentation. Using linoleum, the team created the ‘Kontra’ bookcase, which they describe as ‘a depiction of the forces at play in a cantilever construction’. It’s made of ultra-matte, light grey linoleum, and its modular construction is at once aesthetically essential and complex in its manufacturing.
Finally, using stone composite, the studio created ‘Pilast’, inspired by the Neoclassical Swedish Empire style of the 19th century, which can serve as a seat or a side table. Using traditional woodworking techniques applied to a contemporary material, Snickeriet created a piece that sets the course for the studio’s future experimentation across genres and techniques. §
