Getting to the root of our love affair with vases: The Nordic designs to know

Estrid Ericson once said that you should have a different vase for every sort of flower that you pick. It’s a sentiment the beloved Swedish designer lived and breathed. She adorned her Svenskt Tenn boutique on Strandvägen with a series of the objects, crammed full of vast bunches of blooms, the sweet floral scent wafting through the shop on any given day. To Ericson, a vase is more than just a receptacle for flowers, it’s also an object of beauty and art in its own right, one that morphs and springs to life depending how you fill it.

The vase has long been a point of fascination in the Nordics and beyond. The Dutch Masters painted them bursting with botany (van Gogh’s sunflowers, most notably), a subject mirrored in France by Monet and Manet. And just as a painting of a vase is a reflection of the artist, the vases displayed in our homes are a reflection of ourselves. This is especially true in Scandinavia, where extreme winters render home a place of solace.

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“In Sweden, and I would think in the other Nordic countries too, we tend to invite our friends to our home,” says Cilla Robach, curator at Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum. “So we also tend to think of our homes as much more important for communicating our identity than maybe homes in Italy, where you can sit outside drinking coffee with your friends.” Given that home is our “meeting place”, Robach says, objects of design take on a special importance.

At home, in our personally curated museums, the humble vase becomes a statement. It’s a notion that dates back to the early 20th century when Orrefors, one of Sweden’s big gest glassworks, began to focus its attention on more artistic endeavours. Looking beyond the everyday production churn of lingonberry jam jars, the company, which is still thriving today, began creating beautiful objects for daily use, like sculptural vases.

When Orrefors welcomed designer Simon Gate to the works in 1916, glass, and specifically vases, took on a higher regard. “Orrefors started to engage with artists very successfully in the 1910s,” says Robach. “In that context, glass became, maybe not art, but art and craft pieces.” Simultaneously, Småland, where Orrefors hails from, quickly became considered the centre of Swedish glasswork.

As the worlds of creativity and function began to converge, Svenska Slöjdföreningen (a not-for-profit tasked by the government to promote Swedish crafts) put on a ‘Home exhibition’ at Stockholm museum Liljevalchs Konsthall. Shortly thereafter, Gregor Paulsson, the association’s secretary, published his manifesto Vackrare vardagsvara (More beautiful everyday things) proclaiming that aesthetically pleasing design must also serve a purpose. “So you should not buy porcelain figures without a function,” Robach explains. “Vases became important here. Of course, you're supposed to put flowers in them, but the vase should also be interestingly designed and have that aesthetic quality.”

One iconic item that embodies both form and function is the ultra-modernist Aalto vase, sometimes known as the Savoy. Designed by renowned Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in 1936, the vase is still in production today, taking 12 craftsmen 10 hours to make via a temperature of 1,110°C. Initially conceived for a competition run by Iittala, and later presented at the World Fair in Paris, each mouth-blown vase is formed through folded glass waves, seemingly forever in motion. It was a hit; the vase won first prize and has remained a staple of design lovers ever since. “What flower would actually make it more interesting?” asks Robach. “It has such a strong expression in itself that flowers, or a green branch, do not necessarily make it more beautiful. And, then, you could say that he might have made a sculpture instead; it's not a vase.”

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Just as the Aalto vase was said to be inspired by the surrounding landscape, so too was another triumph of Scandinavian glass design: the Svenskt Tenn Dagg vase. Swedish designer Carina Seth Andersson, who was also responsible for Marimekko’s mouth-blown Urna vase, looked to Sweden’s lush greenery when designing the vase. Specifically, it references the dew droplets that appear at morning light.

Frequenting contemporary design wishlists since its introduction in 2009, you’ve likely spotted a Dagg vase in a particularly well-dressed home or luxury hotel. “There has been a tradition at Svenskt Tenn, ever since Estrid Ericson, to do vases. Josef Frank did vases, and Ericson did an exhibition in 1940 with 100 vases,” says Thommy Bindefeld, Svenskt Tenn’s marketing and creative director. Though a real visual feat, the Dagg wasn’t without its challenges. “It needed a graphite form, and then it is hand-carved inside the form. There are four to six different pieces that form it, and then the glass is blown by hand inside,” says Bindefeld. “It's heavy because it has a lot of glass, and so it's also challenging for the glassblower to lift and get it into that form.”

Though a vase is more often than not used to hold f lowers, it can, on occasion, be inspired by flora, too. Take, for instance, the Georg Jensen ‘Bloom Botanica’. Crafted from sculptural stainless steel and designed by Danish designer Helle Damkjær in 2019, it is thought to mimic the very moment in spring when a darling single young bud bursts into bloom. “Helle works entirely by hand,” explains Ragnar Hjartarson, Georg Jensen’s creative director. “She creates everything initially in clay so that the design comes organically through feel and touch giving her work a unique sensual aspect and a natural and organic flow.”

But when is a vase not a vase at all? Look no further than Fanny Ollas’ wonderfully whimsical deconstructed creations, some of which may struggle to hold an actual flower. The Stockholm-based designer forges her witty anthropomorphic vessels from clay, giving them the appearance of melting, fluid bodies undergoing some sort of psychological journey; some of them appear downtrodden, others pensive. The sort of objects that – in that Toy Story manner – may just spring to life when one’s back is turned.

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While a good vase should be able to gain a strong reputation based on design alone, Tage Andersen’s folded vase rose to fame due to a very specific endorsement. Each New Year, Queen Margrethe II gives her traditional speech to the Danish people with this unusual fan-lake creation sitting by her side. The idea for the ultra-modern, brutalist-style vase, designed in 2002 and crafted from brass and iron, first came about when Andersen was out dining with a blacksmith with whom he collaborates. The designer noticed how a napkin fans out quite spectacularly. “He has a very good sense of material and craft,” explains Monz Andersen, the artist’s husband, adding that his style certainly emits “an organic aesthetic, elegant, brutal, and playful” ease.

Though Tage doesn’t identify himself as being part of a wider “historical tradition of vase designers,” says Monz, he is first and foremost, just like Estrid Ericson before him, a flower-lover. In fact, one of his shop’s customers (Tage has run a flower design shop in Copenhagen since 1987) put it best when they said: “‘It is so clearly designed by somebody that actually loves flowers and [knows] what flowers take, where many other designs are not really made by designers that actually work personally with flowers. And I think that there's some truth in that.”