Luxury outdoor lifestyle

YOU PROBABLY DON’T NEED MORE THINGS. We know. It’s probably not the best ever opening headline in a catalogue. We’ll elaborate on this shortly. But first, let’s talk about luxury. Because it’s a strange concept, and yet one we claim to supply. Luxury outdoor living is our brand tagline. We don’t regard ourselves as being a furniture company, and the definition of luxury is connected to that. Ask a furniture company about luxury and they’ll tell you it’s about exquisite, (yes, they use words like that), design and carefully selected, exclusive materials – the list goes on. Ask us and we’ll answer...

FOURTEEN THOUSAND YEARS IN THE MAKING For some odd reason people decided to move north, from the pleasantly temperate parts of Europe, a long time ago, in fact during the Stone Age. Perhaps they were outcasts. Maybe they were simply restless. Somewhere around 12,000 BC they reached Sweden. They then spent thousands of years taming nature. Getting settled. Building shelters. Calling their shelters home. They went on to building cities, paving streets, reading newspapers, paying taxes, riding commuter trains and tweeting on iPhones. Genetically, we’re still pretty much the same people that came...

ORGANIC GROWTH Product development sounds horribly harsh and calculated, but we still do it of course. Here’s what our process looks like: We get Matilda Lindblom to design a steel chair that’s so gently curved it looks soft. We make two versions of it in a wide range of colors, and add two tables to go with it. Then someone says, or rather thinks out loud, that we perhaps ought to make a lounge chair based on that same soft-looking steel in various colors. Then someone else says it. The seed is planted. Suddenly we find ourselves making sketches, and then a few prototypes and then an actual...

MANUFACTURED WHERE THE KNOWLEDGE IS We produce our teak furniture in Indonesia and Thailand, because that’s where teak craftsmanship is at its best. We’ve got a sort of nostalgic, (and mabye even a tad colonial), notion that manufacturing in the Old World is still a sign of quality. Even though people have been producing teak furniture in Asia for generations. And still do, in large amounts. For the same reasons we make our steel furniture in Europe. There’s a long tradition of welding and making the steel strings used in furniture here. We want everyone to afford our products, but we would never...

RESÖ The E6 motorway runs all the way up to Kirkenes, in the far north of Scandinavia, where Norway meets Russia. But travellers who turn off at Kragenäs, in Bohuslän on the Swedish west coast, and follow the road over two bridges, end up at Resö instead. Resö is a fishing village that refused to die and became a tourist destination. Here you can sit on the veranda of the boarding house by the sea and have a beer. And when you look out across the archipelago, you can easily get an idea for a chair. One that juxtaposes the soft and graceful lines of steel with the sturdy load-bearing ability of...

The Resö range is slowly growing. The dining chair is for breakfasts, lunches and dinners. The lounge chair is for reading novels, drinking cava and minding one’s own business.

KRYSS In 1975, Björn Hultén was commissioned to decorate the Swedish Embassy in Cairo. For the Embassy’s terrace, he designed and set out several foldable chairs. The same type of chair was a favorite of the British, a hundred years earlier, who took them to Egypt, which was then part of the Empire. To decorate an embassy with a former occupying power’s furniture might seem rather ill advised diplomatically. But Björn had already visited Cairo as early as 1960 to see the National Museum’s collection of furniture from Tutankhamon’s tomb. And there it was – the chair. Albeit in ebony, decorated...

Given how good it looks, it’s pretty unlikely that someone would like to actually fold the Kryss Dining Chair to store it. But you can bring it to your favorite place. That’s something.

SKANÖR The southwest corner of Sweden is a peninsula stretching out towards Denmark, and it is home to the twin towns of Skanör and Falsterbo. Both of them exude bohemian nobility and natural privilege. Here, obviously, Joseph Frank drew and built five summer houses – the only ones in Sweden. Here, southern Swedish nobility bathes in the nude. Today the towns have grown into one and it’s not always apparent where Falsterbo ends and Skanör begins. But there is, they say, an embankment separating the two, with Skanör south of it and Falsterbo to the north. Our lounge ranges, Falsterbo and the new...

Skanör is minimalism, maximized. Clean lines and simple, honest construction yes, sure. But also a spendthrift use of cushions, creating a voluptuous cosiness.

H55 The Swedish Society of Industrial Design arranged the Helsingborg Exhibition of 1955 to, in the optimistic spirit of the age, showcase the previous 25 years since the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930. The event acquired the neat nickname of H55. Scandinavia’s designers were extremely well represented, including Alvar Aalto, Stig Lindberg, Yngve Ekström, Finn Juhl and Arne Jacobsen. And Björn Hultén. He designed a sun chair for the exhibition, one of the things that we at Skargaarden have always held dear as a source of reference and inspiration. It’s so perfect it’s almost provocative. How so...

We believe that you could shoot the H55 from every single angle, showing every detail, and stage a photo exhibition that’s more intriguing than most. We may be a bit biased and perhaps we don’t follow the art scene that closely. But still.

DJURÖ Djurö is a secret place. It’s in the middle of Lake Vänern, isolated from the world by freshwater that stretches into the distance: you feel as though you are out at sea, or the last person on Earth. Our Djurö furniture range is not quite so secret. But it does share some of the same qualities: the same sensation of other-worldliness. Djurö has a link to the past, to the iconic Scandinavian teak furniture of the 50s. It also gives a very nonchalant nod to the future, in the durable acrylic fabric in the chair seat and backrest. Together, the past and future combine to create a strong sensation...