Stories

workshop
stories

matilda beckman

Our Workshop Chair by Cecilie Manz is named after its place of origin: the workshop. Designed from the idea of an everyday chair, the chair came to be through a free design process that experimented with forms and shapes in the workshop until ending up at the final design. We wanted to take the concept of our Workshop Chair further, visiting three creatives across Scandinavia to hear about their workshops, how surroundings can affect your creativity and how having a space dedicated to your work shapes your creations. The first of our three creatives is Matilda Beckman, a Stockholm-based multidisciplinary designer

“My workshop is in an old area of Stockholm’s Södermalm area. It used to be a sugar factory and is surrounded by cobbled streets and old brick houses, built throughout the 1700s and 1800s. Just outside the studio is the steepest slope in Stockholm, known as Trouble Hill.

I’m very affected by the environment that’s around me. Sounds, smells and how the light falls influences my work in some way. It can sound very nineties-kitsch but I think there’s a force within nature and your surroundings that affect you. Imagine working in a clean, white-painted cubicle: There’d be nothing there to inspire you! Spending time in an old building with its own history and adding your touch to it gives something back to you and your work.”

One of Matilda’s works, the Yves Stool, in collaboration with Axel Wannberg.
Photo by Marcus Hansen.
MATILDA BECKMAN Having a space that’s dedicated to working in allows you to put everything else aside for a while. It’s almost like a retreat in the sense that taking a break from your daily life allows you to place all that energy into your work as well as the other way around.
MATILDA BECKMAN I think it’s interesting how we as humans can have an on-and-off switch for our work. We need that switch and having a space to work helps you flick that switch. We need spaces that feeds the thought, fuels our imagination and allows us to be the protagonist of own workshop.

Images by Jonas Jacob Svensson.

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