Despoke

To celebrate the inspirational Norwegian designs being showcased at the 100% Norway exhibition during the London Design Festival, we have just launched a competition to ‘Win a Norwegian Living Room’ worth £8,000! To enter now, visit the Norwegian Embassy in London Facebook page.. The prize consists of beautiful furniture and interior pieces from some of Norway’s design stars.
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Have you still got nightmares about the yellow-ish, twig-infested pine furniture that haunted homes across Northern Europe and the US a decade or two ago? Well, you’re not alone. Now, however, a Norwegian manufacturer and a local design duo have joined forces to create a new furniture series in, would you believe it, pine!

Even though pine is the cheapest and most available material in Norway (as the country is full of it and has a complete infrastructure around it), the talented pool of local designers has stayed far far away from the material. Norwegians, and particularly the local design industry, refer to the 1980s as their ‘pine hell’, and furniture made out of the material has since been regarded as typical rural Norwegian, very anti-urban and unfashionable. So when manufacturer VAD, a family-owned company on Norway’s north-west coast, did the unthinkable and wanted to make a new series of seating and tables in pine, a number of designers hung up on them. However, recently formed Bergen-based duo Knudsen & Hindenes stayed on the line and accepted the challenge.
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Say hello to the clock that knits the time and which by the end of a year has produced a 2 meter long scarf, perfect for the January freeze.

“I am fascinated by everyday incidents, unconscious ways of acting and invisible processes,” says Norwegian designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen who has just graduated from the University of Arts in Berlin. “I like to observe and challenge the things we take for granted… like time passing.”
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