Yngve Ekström

In 1913, the architect, sculptor and designer Yngve Ekström was born in Hagafors in the furniture region of Småland, Sweden. He would come into contact with the material wood at an early age and worked in a sawmill. Alongside his work, he studied drawing, sculpture, painting, music and art history, and eventually began to specialise in home decoration. Ekström has become one of the foremost representatives of the Scandinavian design language in the 20th century. He designed everything from logos to catalogues and advertisements, but it was as a furniture designer that he made his greatest mark on Swedish design history. His designs are characterised by delicate bentwood furniture with a timeless elegance. Yngve Ekström had the ability to combine the austere with the light, the functional with the beautiful.

Yngve Ekström's work includes several so-called design classics. Furniture such as the Pinnockio chair and the Arka armchair are widely recognised. What characterises both these pieces of furniture is the austere design language and the stylish design that feels as relevant today as it did when they were designed in the mid-1950s. The chairs are still made today in Småland, Sweden by the classic furniture company Stolab. The biggest classic of them all has to be the beautiful and comfortable Lamino armchair made by Swedese. This is emphasised not least by the magazine Sköna hem, whose readers named it the Swedish furniture of the century in 1999. You can find a wide range of Yngve Ekström's design classics for Stolab and Swedese at NO-GA.