Swedish design
Furniture, glass and ceramics across a century.
Andrzej Otrębski — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Unknown authorUnknown author — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Unknown authorUnknown author — CC BY 4.0
For material reasons before aesthetic ones. **Light**: long dark winters force pale colours, reflective surfaces and large windows. **Wood**: abundant, cheap forest, so the basic material is timber rather than marble. **Small homes** and middling incomes in egalitarian societies, so furniture has to be practical and affordable. And above that an explicit social principle that took hold in the 1930s: good design is a right rather than a privilege, and factories should produce it for everyone. The result is a plain, functional, pale style — which IKEA later exported to the world.
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The Röhsska is **Sweden's only museum devoted to design and the applied arts**, and it is the right place to understand why Scandinavian design looks the way it does. It was founded in 1916 on a bequest from the Röhss brothers, Gothenburg merchants. The collection runs to about fifty thousand objects: furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles, fashion, industrial design and posters — mainly Swedish, with European and Asian sections. Its most important part covers **twentieth-century Swedish design** and its stated principle: beauty for all — the idea that cheap everyday things should be well designed, rather than beauty being a luxury. That social principle is the origin of what later became commercial Scandinavian design, and it fed directly into IKEA. There is also a good Asian collection of Chinese and Japanese ceramics. **Charges are low** and entry is free for under-twenties. In the quiet university district of Vasastaden.
Furniture, glass and ceramics across a century.
Chinese and Japanese ceramics in a design museum.
Vasagatan 37-39, Gothenburg