From grannies to influencers – How the iconic interior brand Svenskt Tenn never lost its mojo

There are not many Swedish public schools where, if you were to wander the corridors, you would brush up against the revered designs of one of the greats of Swedish modernism. But in a little primary school in the tiny
town of Hjo, nestled in the western part of the country, lucky pupils are surrounded by artefacts and prints from a quintessential Scandinavian design brand.

The children try their best to adopt a hands-off approach to the interiors – no sticky fingers here please – but it is probable that Estrid Ericson, for whom the Estrid Ericson skolan is named, would have been delighted by their creative curiosity. After all, long before she founded Svenskt Tenn, one of the country’s most iconic interior design companies, Ericson worked as an art teacher who favoured experimentation and breaking the mould above all else.

Related: Svenskt Tenn just released the ultimate collaboration for any upcoming crayfish parties

Having first set up shop in 1924 on Stockholm’s Smålandsgatan, just three years after the country’s women received the right to vote, a spirited 30-year-old Ericson began by selling her decorative pewter wares (hence the name ‘Swedish tin’). Among Svenskt Tenn’s first offerings were the round powder fish box and the urn ‘Peruanska’, emblazoned with tiny ducks, marching up its rounded sides.

By 1925, Ericson was already making ripples in the design world, and just two years later, having outgrown its original premises, the company moved onto Strandvägen, a decadent stretch along Stockholm’s waterfront, where it still stands like an Aladdin’s cave today – providing a pilgrimage for Svenskt Tenn fans the world over.

By the mid 1930s, with Austrian architect and designer Josef Frank on board, the brand ventured into furniture, one of the first pieces being the curved ‘Liljevalchs’ sofa, still in production. The sofa, and Frank’s arrival in Stockholm signalled a shift in the aesthetics of the house . “Svenskt Tenn's style really changed with Joseph Frank, it became much bolder, much more colourful, and much more human. It’s about as far away from Swedish functionalism as you can get,” explains Thommy Bindefeld, marketing and creative director at the brand.

This design union between Frank and Ericson helped lay a fertile foundation on which Svenskt Tenn was built over the proceeding years. “Svenskt Tenn wouldn't have been what it is today without him. There is a quote that says: ‘He did everything she wanted and she accepted everything that he did.’”

In the decades since, with 3,000 furniture sketches and 250 print designs now nestled in their archives, Svenskt Tenn’s form of eclectic maximalism has fallen both in and out of fashion. Still, it has managed to retain a soft spot in the heart of most Swedes. Attend a wedding, christening or a b-i-g birthday today and you will undoubtedly find at least one of their keepsakes, such as the pewter candle holders or trays, being gifted away to a lucky recipient.

The word ‘Svensk t Tenn’ has become intrinsically bound to the Swedish sense of occasion and sentimentality – our major, life-affirming milestones are now marked in tin. “My daughter got the heart box for her christening as a gift,” explains Ebba Kleberg von Sydow, 41, founder of fashion platform Säker stil, “it's also my standard gift for christenings, too. I have them for everything, I even have one where I put the kids' baby teeth.”

Related: The myth of Scandi minimalism: Is the interior trend a lie?

And it’s not just the brand’s accessories which have helped provide a backdrop to our most critical moments, Svenskt Tenn furniture is also so highly-prized that it is commonly passed on through multiple generations, acting as a design souvenir to one’s lineage. Many formative years will have been spent surrounded by these artefacts – large and small – dotted around the homes of parents and grandparents. Running a finger over the mahogany of one of their cabinets evokes memories of bygone days.

Kleberg von Sydow is someone who has gladly accepted these family hand-me-downs, rehoming a number of her parents and grandparents’ Svenskt Tenn pieces in her Östermalm apartment where she has lived for the last seven years. “I think a lot of people forget that sometimes the perfect mix of interiors is also a mix of your history. We usually tend to put those pieces in storage and then just drool over the perfect designer ‘it’ furniture,” she says. “But I hope, and think, that we’re slowly moving away from that.”

Though she began seriously collecting pieces when she was just 19 years old, for Kleberg von Sydow, as for many of the brand’s disciples, her first taste of the interior design company started much earlier: namely, when she was just a child spending long holidays running around her grandparents' summer house outside Gothenburg. “I didn't realise it at the time, but they loved Josef Frank, so it's nostalgic for me. It's also my definition of a homey, wonderful place where I can just let my shoulders down and relax,” she says.

When her grandmother, a Frank evangelist, passed away, Kleberg von Sydow was given a number of her pieces, including a set of bedside tables from the 1950s. “Now, every day when I wake up, they are the very first thing I see and it makes me so happy,” she says. “She had the typical big green Svenskt Tenn book shelves too. I had been dreaming about these bookshelves forever, and so, for my 40th birthday, I got them as a massive present for myself. My grandmother would have loved it. I can just close my eyes and picture hers.”

Another thing that makes Svenskt Tenn indelibly Swedish is its focus on homegrown craftsmanship. All of the brand’s furniture is still made locally and pieces are intended to last a lifetime or longer, a sentiment that has caught the attention of the younger, sustainably-minded crowd. “They understand that if you buy something from Svenskt Tenn it can last for generations,” says Bindefeld. “It’s of such a high quality that they can certainly be sold again and again – that’s the best sustainable way of shopping.”

Buying Svenskt Tenn pieces second hand at auction is an attractive solution for interior lovers wanting to dip their toes in the circular economy. When you consider that 10 million tonnes of furniture is discarded by consumers and businesses in the EU every year, according to the European Environment Bureau, it’s no wonder that more of us want to lighten the load. Plus, the thrill of the dopamine-inducing bid can be appealing, particularly to a young millennial customer.

"The majority of my pieces are from auctions and antique stores. Yes, it can be a bit stressful – obviously, you don't win all the auctions – but it’s happy stress,” explains 32-year-old Lisa Hauschildt Torell, an interior designer who has lived in her Stockholm apartment for four years. And thanks to the assortment of references used by Frank in his many works, the brand truly holds an eternal appeal. Hauschildt Torell agrees that one of the most alluring aspects of the designs is the ability to endure.

“Svenskt Tenn pieces are never outdated, that's what I love about them. The classical cabinets and the pewter vases – I could not imagine an apartment, a house, or indeed a year, in which they wouldn't work,” she says. The much-loved floral and plant motif, for instance, known as ‘Anakreon’, was inspired by an artwork in a Greek temple, a 3,500-year-old fresco from the New Palace of Knossos on Crete, which Ericson first spotted in a book.

Related: 7 key interior trends you need to know about this year

“Frank brought references from historical designs and mixed them up with his own,” says Bindefeld. “It becomes timeless because he mixed so many different time periods.” The brand has between 40-45 different prints still in production today, with many of their classics still seamlessly appealing to a modern sensibility. The joy-bringing ‘Tulpaner ’ print, for example, whose blooms look as fresh today as when they were first designed by Frank in 1943.

And then there’s the bright and bold ‘Manhattan’ print, created by the designer sitting at his kitchen table in New York, exiled from his home by the occupying German forces. “His way of doing prints was really eye-catching, your eye sticks on it,” asserts Bindefeld. “What's fascinating is that we can still take out a print from the archive and set it in production, and because of the colours and the way it is made, it still feels contemporary.”

The ethos has cultivated some Svenskt Tenn die-hards, like Eva Langenskiöld, 86, who has lived in her home in Stockholm’s Karlaplan for over 32 years. “I am one of the oldest fans of the brand,” she insists. “I have collected Svenskt Tenn since the 1950s – everything from lamps to furniture, and my speciality is the pewter items,
like vases.” Langenskiöld can even recall seeing the ever-diligent Ericson pottering around the Strandvägen store; she “was in the shop every day, going around and arranging beautiful bouquets of flowers.”

In the last few years, thanks to a resurgence in maximalism (or ‘accidentism’, as Frank coined it) style, there’s a swathe of younger, millennial customers who are now flocking to Strandvägen 5, looking for an updated take on the icons of old. Perhaps they’re even starting their own collections to later be passed down, although their choices might be a little different than those before them – mixing Svenskt Tenn pieces with other Scandinavian design greats from the same era (such as Carl Hansen) along with newer contemporary pieces, such as from the Italian lighting brand Flos.

“They want the brand, but in a new way,” says Hedvig Barnekow, director of Svenskt Tenn’s interior design studio. Presumably, this is an approach that Frank himself would have approved of. He was a man who rejected the puritanical principles of contemporaries like Le Corbusier, who wanted the home to be machine-like, instead favouring a freer, less rigid stance. He favoured comfort and cosiness above all else.

“It’s a very permitting interior design philosophy,” says Barnekow. “It should be personal and you can mix in pieces which you have bought in auctions, even Ikea – everything is allowed as long as the home feels personal.” Through this more accessible, unrestrained approach to interior design, individuals can make the brand their own, tailoring heritage pieces to their contemporary homes. “I love to mix,” says Hauschildt Torell. “If you compose a look in fashion or if you compose a room or an art piece, it should always have different influences.”

This ‘mix and match’ approach is embodied in Frank’s work too, where he paired multiple materials, colours and textures together under one roof. By designing pieces individually – never in a series – each item maintained a distinct personality. “It’s one brand with so many different expressions,” says Barnekow. Some of the most popular archive pieces today are the upholstered furniture items, such as Couch ‘775’ and Stool ‘647’, which you can adapt with the brand’s assortment of joy-inducing textiles. “You can choose different patterns on the fabric and you can make it your own,” as Barnekow puts it. “It looks so different depending on which fabric you put on it."

Related: The interiors pieces to invest in now, according to the experts

Still, the team behind Svenskt Tenn today aren’t singularly focused on upholding Ericson’s legacy, they are also keen on looking to the brand’s future, collaborating with emerging contemporary designers. “I try to find designers or artists that have an aesthetic which works well together with Svenskt Tenn and Josef Frank, but also still stands on its own and stands out,” says Bindefeld. “The mixture of the historical and the contemporary is what makes it so interesting.”

In recent years, they’ve signed up the likes of Luke Edward Hall, a British interior designer known in his home country for his whimsical, colour-heavy designs but who went largely under the radar here in the Nordics until their 2019 collaboration . This spring, Danish jewellery designer Charlotte Lynggaard created the ‘North Sea’, a collection filled with sea life-inspired, hand-painted ceramics.

“They're brave enough to let contemporary designers just embrace Josef Frank and Estrid Ericson in a beautiful way, and interpret what they would have done today,” says Kleberg von Sydow, explaining how Lynggaard reportedly considered designing a floral pattern for her collection, before opting for a watery-theme. She said, “How can anyone do a floral pattern for Svenskt Tenn when Josef Frank has already done it to perfection?”

A heritage brand must continually walk a difficult tightrope: remain relevant and fresh, yet stay true to its history. But as the design brand nears its centenary mark, we sense that things won’t be slowing down for Svenskt Tenn any time soon. As Bindefeld explains: “Home is never finished, it's a developing process. It’s something that you continue to work on for your whole life.”