This new-gen designer is joining the battle for Sweden’s forests, one shelf at a time

“It kind of feels boring; the Swedish furniture world is very boring,” says the 25-year-old rising star designer Simon Mattisson when I ask him about the state of design today. It’s a bold remark for someone who has only been ‘in the game’ for a few years, but one look at Mattisson’s sculptural and wild creations and you have to forgive him. Hailing from a country that has spawned many of the design greats, you would think there might be an added pressure to follow suit. But this designer is all about sticking his head above the parapet.

This wasn’t necessarily always the case. In fact, the design of things and the way items are dreamt up from hand to production line, and then crafted together, rarely used to seep into his consciousness at all. “I didn't really realise that someone thought about the shape of the glass that I was holding in my hand,” he says. “And that someone had put effort into making the lip feel good when you drink from it.”

For years, his creative focus was music and, perhaps less creative, more focus, were his postie duties. Living in Uppsala, where he hails from, he would spend his days out riding his bike, delivering the mail, in his Postman uniform. On down days, he would hit up the studio, which he shared with his rapper friend, along with a salsa and reggae band. “That was my dream; I was making music on my computer and I was part of different hip hop groups where I was the producer. That was my plan,” he recalls. But then, plans change. Mattisson started to spend more and more time out on the studio’s terrace, transforming the space into his own little dreamland atelier, painting bright colourful, expressive canvases to pass the time in between recordings. “It was a very inspirational place, lots of weird drums and stuff,” he laughs.

After a time at Åland's community college, and later Beckman’s College of Design, he started to see the world a little differently. That glass now had a maker. And the rim, a designer. “I really kind of quickly realised that this was something that I wanted to devote my life to,” says Mattisson. Then in 2022, something peculiar happened. Like many great moments of inspiration, which often arise when you least expect them, creativity came knocking at a family party. It was Midsummer and Mattisson and his family were hanging out, roasting a boar (stay with me) and just generally shooting the shit.

The seating plan was all mapped out and Mattisson found himself, rather awkwardly one would assume, sat next to a sort of ‘familiar stranger’, the sister of someone’s someone. But there were no painful silences to follow, as Mattisson and the dinner guest, a forest inspector by trade whose rather weighty role is to take care of Sweden’s forests, struck up conversation. “We got to talking and it turns out that if you work with where they're taking care of the forest in the 21st millennium, you work almost exclusively with bark beetles, so we ended up talking about the spruce bark beetle for two or three hours,” he remembers.

Unbeknown to many (myself and Mattisson included) a war has been raging in forests up and down Sweden. A battle that is between tree and beetle – one that the spruce is currently losing. But it got the designer’s cogs whirring. “I started thinking about this damn spruce bark beetle,” he says. For the uninitiated, the sneaky spruce bark beetle can sniff out a tree through smell, and when it likes what it ‘sees’ it gets under its bark, boring channels and chambers. Though beautiful, the damage is devastating for a spruce and its wood. “You can't use it for anything because you can't really guarantee the stability of the wood,” explains Mattisson, “you might just send it to get burned for heating or energy.”

Soon this tiny critter started to get under Mattisson’s own skin. And he wondered whether he could somehow repurpose the rotten, unusable wood into something new and beautiful. “I was doing a lot of small scale 3D-printing at the time, and then it dawned on me, I was like, ‘What if you take this wood and grind it down?” he says. And so soon, his furniture series, Granland (which means land of spruce in Swedish) was born, moulded out of the notion and patterns that the spruce bark beetle digs. What was once old, and decayed, is born again.

Granland’s sculptural, whirling designs fashioned from wood composite are as breathtaking as they are sustainably minded. Their conceptual forms left wide-open for the user to determine, just as acceptable as a bookshelf or a piece of art. Though Mattisson says: “From my point of view, I designed them not to necessarily hold like 10,000 books, but maybe to hold, and even elevate, a handbag – or for one really cool pen.”

Well, it better be one very stylish pen, that’s for sure.