Author name: Natalia Muntean

Barber Osgerby and Kasthall: Letting the Loom Lead Text by Natalia Muntean Atlas and Bon Bon, the first collaboration between London-based Barber & Osgerby and Swedish carpet manufacturer Kasthall, were born directly from the conditions of the industrial loom. Working closely with Kasthall’s team in Kinna, Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby spent time on the factory floor, immersing themselves in the rhythm and constraints of the mill before a single design decision was made. Rather than imposing a fixed aesthetic, they allowed the tools, techniques and archive of a 135-year-old company to shape the direction of their work, arriving, through experimentation and some sixty prototypes, at two collections that are as different from each other as they are from anything Kasthall has produced before. Natalia Muntean spoke with Edward Barber. Natalia Muntean: A lot of the collaboration with Kasthall was about listening and understanding their process. Was there something that surprised you, or maybe a limitation that inspired you when you were working with their industrial loom, something that changed the process, or made you rethink certain things?Edward Barber: I’d never done woven carpets before, so it was a completely new experience for me. And with every project I do, before designing anything, I always like to go and see where the objects are made and how they’re made, and talk to the people who make them, especially if it’s a craft project. And in a way, whilst this is industrial, for me this is also very much a craft project.So I spent a few days at the factory in Kinna to understand the process. They explained how the loom works. The basics are incredibly simple: you have the warp, and then you weave in between it, but when it comes to creating different patterns and techniques, it suddenly becomes much more complicated. They also have an extensive archive, so I spent some time going through it, mainly to see the range of colours they offer. A lot of it is very decorative and floral, which wasn’t what we were doing. The thing about archives is that they’re useful to a certain extent, but if you get too deep into them, you get lost, and they influence you too much. It’s good to get an idea and then close the door. After that, we started putting some experiments together. It was a back-and-forth process of them making samples, sending them to me, me changing the size of the weave or the colours, or asking more questions. When you come to something completely new, you have no preconceived ideas about what’s possible and what isn’t, so you ask what might seem like stupid questions. And sometimes they say, that’s interesting, we hadn’t thought of doing that before. They’re so nice to work with, such amazing people. We had a great dialogue, and it was really just a question of samples, changing them, more samples, until eventually we got to three different designs, three different patterns. They’re very simple, just straightforward woven carpets, but they’re really beautiful. I’m very, very pleased with them.NM: When you decided to work together, you didn’t have a preconceived plan as such; you went to Kinna, got to know their process, and that’s how the ideas started?EB: I’d seen Kasthall carpets over the years. I was aware of the company, and I’d seen various designs, but I didn’t think, this is what we need to do. It was really looking at some of the techniques they’d used in the past and saying, well, what about if we do this, but change this aspect of it? Can we make this bigger or smaller? What if we add two different coloured threads instead of using a single colour? Things like that, just asking questions, really. NM: Tell me about the two collections, Atlas and Bon Bon. How did you come up with the names, and what distinguishes one from the other?EB: Bon Bon is much stronger, more graphic in terms of its colourways. We use colour a lot in the studio, in a way that’s quite experimental, quite strong. With Bon Bon, we really went for it and tried to mix three colours on each carpet to create one finished colour. So the pattern is quite small, from a distance it might look like the carpet is one colour, but as you get closer, you can clearly see three different colours working together. It felt like a jar of sweets. And the names all reflect edible things. You’ve got Liquorice, Lemon, Toffee, Berry, Rhubarb, and Damson. They’re more playful, possibly even for a younger market.  Atlas is a very chunky weave, so you get quite a thick carpet. And what we’ve done is mix two or three colours, on one we’ve got four, and it comes across quite randomly. So each carpet will look different because the threads moving across don’t go evenly every time. Sometimes you have a green thread on top and sometimes an orange thread, so you get this nice variation of tone and colour. I would call this a more organic, natural-looking carpet, and the colours reflect that. We called it Atlas because these colours, when woven, were quite reminiscent of older Moroccan carpets, with natural dyes for the threads. The Atlas Mountains are in Morocco, and when you look at the design, you see triangular shapes that resemble a mountain range. So we thought, Atlas. The two are completely different directions. NM: The intriguing thing about Atlas is that when you look closely, you can very clearly see the warp. Why was it important to leave it exposed, and how does it change how the rug feels?EB: Whenever we design anything, we always try to find a different way, or a new way to do something. With carpets, that’s pretty difficult – they’ve been around for thousands of years. But it’s a little unusual to be able to see the warp exposed the way it is. After some of the experiments, I was

Norwegian Design Makes its Move on Sweden On a recent evening at the Norwegian Embassy in Stockholm, six Norwegian design brands gathered for an intimate showcase hosted by Norsk Industri. The event was less a trade fair than a declaration that contemporary Norwegian design, rooted in landscape, material honesty, and a near-philosophical commitment to longevity, has something urgent to say to the Swedish market. The brands ranged from century-spanning furniture makers to a new generation rethinking acoustics, textiles, and stone. What united them was a resistance to trend cycles and a conviction that how something is made is inseparable from what it means. Flokk & Fjell works with waste wool that would otherwise be discarded, dyeing it with plant-based pigments from local raw materials to produce handmade acoustic panels that are also objects of beauty. Founder and architect Annemieke Koopmans unveiled a new collection, Winter Landscapes, exclusively at the Stockholm event, her ambition being to bring indoors the same stillness one finds out in nature.  Norsk Dun’s new collaboration with designer Gustav Ovland takes a similar approach to materiality. Recycled fibres, mineral-based pigments, pomegranate peel – the collection’s palette is drawn from what already exists and would otherwise be lost. The results are textiles with a warmth that synthetic processes rarely achieve. “Good design is about creating something people want to live with for a long time,” says Ovland.  LK Hjelle has been making furniture in Sykkylven since 1940. Every piece still leaves their own factory, still bears the Made in Norway mark, still built for repair and reupholstery rather than replacement. Their collaborators, Andreas Engesvik, Hallgeir Homstvedt, Jonas Stokke, are among Norway’s most respected designers, and the furniture has found its way into the Norwegian National Opera and embassies worldwide. CEO Jens Peter Brunstad’s vision is simple and unsparing: no one should ever need to throw away a piece of LK Hjelle furniture.  Ekornes brought two new Stressless® models, Adam, recently awarded the Red Dot Design Award, and Bay, that make ergonomic rigour feel like luxury rather than compromise. Both are built for durability, both designed to support the body in the way the body actually moves. Comfort, here, is not a selling point. It is the whole point. Fora Form’s BAST, designed by London-based Norwegian duo Hunting & Narud, is a modular low table system that thinks in the long term. Solid oak, floating aluminium, three sizes that can stand alone or compose into something larger. Every joint engineered for disassembly and repair, with longevity written into the object’s logic from the start. The most structurally ambitious proposition came from Lundhs Real Stone®. Their Larvikite and Anorthosite, formed hundreds of millions of years ago, entirely free of quartz, are no longer simply surface materials. A ten-storey building on Finchley Road in London now uses Larvikite as its load-bearing exoskeleton, replacing concrete and steel in what is believed to be a first of its kind. “Larvikite is more than a surface material,” says Business Developer Thomas Løvald. “It is architecture in its most fundamental form.” From Oslo’s Sommerro House to the University of Oslo, the stone keeps finding new ways to hold things up.