Wick Chair is a modular and versatile shell chair inspired by traditional Swedish woodchip baskets. 

The duo responsible for the Wick Chair are designers with roots in the province of Smaland, where so much of the skills and expertise of the Swedish furniture industry have developed. Their lengthy experience of designing furniture and other products both for the home and for the public sector has given the duo a detailed understanding of the criteria for a modular shell chair. “Karl and Jesper placed an old basket in front of me, explaining that this was what they had in mind,” Anders Färdig (Managing Director of Design House Stockholm) remarks. “I was pretty much all at sea!” The intention was never to produce a basket but the item that the designers presented explains the origins of the Wick Chair and the values that it conveys.

That the Wick Chair is plaited in similar fashion to the wood-chip basket signals the design tradition from which it springs, but the plaiting can equally well be seen as an aspect of the designers’ elegant solution to a difficult practical problem. “There are limits to how much one can bend wood,” Karl Malmvall explains. “That was why we decided on the plaiting.”

This pragmatic, no-nonsense approach, has been directly inherited from the country-craft tradition but it is also a solution that gives the Wick Chair its unique shape. 

“The chair gains a resilience and a tension that one cannot achieve using solid wood,” Karl Malmvall explains. Wood, whether it is solid or laminated as in the slender back to the Wick Chair, is more pleasant than plastic which is often experienced as either too cold or too hot. This is yet another reason why the chair has found a home with Design House Stockholm which is a firm that unites bold design with materials that are associated with the Scandinavian design tradition which, in turn, is renewed when the avant-garde is successfully united with tradition.