Åke Axelsson
Åke Axelsson (b. 1932) has designed and built more than 200 chair models during his 60-year career as an interior architect, from 1957 to the present. His major contribution has focussed on furniture for the public domain where we can all meet: libraries, restaurants, town halls, churches, museums, cafés and so on. These interiors often lead to specific designs of furniture which were then put into production. His focus has been social; designing the best possible furniture for all of us.
Åke grew up with seven siblings on a small farm in the south of Sweden during the 1930s and 1940s. The subsistence farm economy meant that almost everything had to be done by hand. Survival was inherent to the hands and the materials. ”Do it yourself” was a lesson that became typical of his professional life. Åke is by no means just a draughtsman. When he is developing a new item of furniture he goes to his workshop and creates a viable prototype using his wood-working skills. While he was still at elementary school his teacher recognized that Åke had “something in his fingers” and he encouraged him to go on developing his skills. His first piece of furniture was a little wall-cupboard that he completed at the age of twelve. It still hangs on his wall at home. Following some local wood-working courses, at fifteen he left home to train as a cabinet-maker in Visby during the years 1947 to 1951. More advanced students built furniture for the famous Swedish designer Carl Malmsten. The furniture was sold at the Malmsten shop in central Stockholm. Following this, Åke undertook an apprenticeship in Munich and then in the little Swedish town of Östervåla. But he soon began to long for something more in life than the somewhat dreary prospect of working in a furniture factory.
He applied for admission to Konstfack - now known as the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm - where he trained as an interior architect from 1952 to 1957. “It was like entering a brand-new world”. His principal tutor, Carl-Axel Acking, was an architect and furniture designer and he prepared his students for important tasks in Sweden’s emerging welfare state. Lecture theatres, adult education facilities, schools, town halls - there were any number of commissions. And cabinet-maker Åke Axelsson helped to build the new society.
For some years in the 1960s Åke ran an interior-design office together with architect Erik Karlström. Among their projects was the interior of the prize-winning town hall in Örebro, a building designed by architects Erik and Tore Ahlsén. In 1963 Åke took part in a competition aimed at preserving the beech trees of southern Sweden. He submitted his chair S-217 which was put into production by the firm of Gärsnäs and has continued in production right up until the present in several variants. By 1957 Åke had tired of the large-scale interior commissions. “I didn’t relish being the boss.” And he started his first workshop in the coastal town of Vaxholm. He made his début in 1968 at the craft centre in Stockholm known as Hantverket where he showed a fêted collection which then functioned as a bank of ideas for many of his future furniture designs. His idea of a workshop was somewhat romantic and sales in the shop were too modest to support his family. Åke returned to large-scale interior designs including the Swedish parliament with Peter Celsing as the architect. During the 1970s Åke also taught at Konstfack. And he devoted himself to basic research studying historical furniture with the eye and skill of a cabinet-maker rather than of an art historian. How was ancient Egyptian and Greek furniture constructed? What could it teach us today?
During the 1980s Åke undertook large-scale commissions: for example the Stockholm School of Economics, the Swedish parliament, Stockholm’s Press Club), the Culture Centre in Stockholm, the public library in Leksand, the Swedish Institute in Rome and the historic Stockholm restaurant Den Gyldene Freden. In 1984 he built himself a new workshop and home outside Vaxholm, a place that grew over the years. He was not entirely in step with the trends of the day with furniture as a work of art and he created, almost as a protest, simple plywood furniture. He also studied modernism’s own furniture with chairs from the Bauhaus and from De Stijl; a trail that is as important to him as the timeless quality of classical antiquity’s furniture and the tradition of cabinet-making inspired by Carl Malmsten.
Towards the end of the decade Åke began to feel a longing for undertaking his own production. Together with his daughter Anna, in 1988 he created Galleri Stolen which manufactured Åke’s furniture, principally for the public domain but also for private customers. A year or two later he purchased a bankrupt factory in southern Sweden. He wanted to counter the decline and disappearance of the Swedish furniture manufacturers. Åke’s own production extended the factory’s life by 17 years. Large-scale interior commissions in the 1990s included the Riksdag Library, the public library in Karlskrona, the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, art museum Grafikens hus, the naval museum in Karskrona, various restaurants and libraries and a grand room for representation in the palace. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art at Gateshead was a vast undertaking in a raw, industrial atmosphere.
In 2003 Galleri Stolen was able to purchase the Gärsnäs furniture factory which was in financial difficulties. Following some challenging years and with new chair designs by Åke, the company regained its profitability. Today, Gärsnäs is one of Sweden’s most innovative and successful furniture companies, collaborating with a number of younger furniture designers, among them David Ericson, Färg & Blanche, TAF, Nina Jobs and Pierre Sindre.
Despite the fact that Åke Axelsson has reached pensionable age, he has carried on working. Major public commissions after the millennium include a new entrance and café for Stockholm’s City Museum, a restaurant for Sweden’s History Museum, chairs for the former abbey church at Vreta, and for the St. Tomas church in Vällingby. Åke also designed the shop at Sven-Harry’s art gallery in Stockholm, as well as premises at the Academy of Fine Arts. He created several rooms for the Värmland Museum in Karlstad, together with developing 400 parchment-upholstered unique chairs for the Fredrik Church in Karlskrona.
In 2017 Åke built a new, separate workshop at Engarn next to the house where he lives. He has equipped it with the latest machines. Besides using the workshop for developing prototypes, Åke also manufactures furniture there, aiming to show that even small-scale production of items can defend its place in the market. In this time of ecological crisis the furniture industry needs to change its focus, become circular and environmentally wiser. Åke’s workshop functions as an inspirational model of this.
