When Did Scandinavian Design Get So Boring?

This story is part of Fair Take, our reporting on global design events that looks up close at the newest ideas in fixtures, furnishings, and more.

At a dinner in Stockholm recently celebrating the late Danish designer Verner Panton’s 100th birthday, Erik Rimmer, editor of Bo Bedre, the unofficial bible of Nordic design, put questions to a panel of design-world honchos to get a pulse check on the future of the region’s long-standing dominance over our homes. The room shimmered tip-to-toe in chrome, including Panton’s Panthella lamps and Pantonova seating, runners lining banquette tables, and a cascading backdrop for the panel. Rimmer had a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he baited a big hook. "I’ve covered a lot of Scandinavian design in my career," he said, "and I must say, it can be quite boring." What did they think about that, he wanted to know.

Nobody swallowed the barb, but there was nibbling. Phillipp Materna, the design lead for Ferm Living, a high-output Danish brand that makes blob mirrors and bouclé lounges for millennials matriculating from Ikea, said he "wasn’t going to go there." (If we did need a new perspective, though, he suggested we might look to distant shores; Materna himself is from Canada.) Louis Poulsen’s chief design officer, Monique Faber, gave Rimmer’s prompt the side eye, too—was she really going to say the modernist goliath she helms is snoozy? Nobody on the panel of four was ready to agree with Rimmer—fair enough. But collectively, there was an admission that yes, there might be room for some fresh thinking.

The squeamish moment during Stockholm’s design week embodied what has now become a long-simmering anxiety for Scandinavian design: that it might finally be losing its luster. Its aesthetics and now-clichéd descriptors—sleek, minimalist, clean-lined, natural, hygge, timeless—surged through the late 2010s. (In the last few years of the decade, Dwell ran no fewer than 50 headlines using the word "Scandinavian" to describe a home—since 2020, there have been far fewer than that.) Several of the influencers, critics, and designers Dwell spoke with at the beginning of the year said they were done with minimalism (to many, shorthand for the Scandi aesthetic) and ready for richness and complexity, or at least to step away from the idea that subtlety is the only path toward serenity—or that paring things down is an end in itself.

Pockets beyond the Nordics reflect a desire for something punchier, too. From Puerto Rico, Estudio PM won a design contest last year at ICFF, North America’s biggest furniture fair, for tables and stools made from reclaimed textiles, one of which draws inspiration from horned masks worn during festivals on the island to ward off evil. The pieces are essentially collages celebrating ephemerality, "intended to change over time as an exploration of form and narrative." Some of the most memorable pieces from 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen last year came from Belgium. Valerie Objects, based in Antwerp, debuted Klasky-Csupo–colored lighting by design duo Muller Van Severn based on a lamp shade they unearthed from a flea market—the results might feel precious, but the input isn’t. At We Design Beirut in Lebanon, which ran its second edition in 2025, if designers put anything on a pedestal, it was only to knock them off of it. In one moment that can really only be described as performance craft, Dwell’s managing editor Jack Balderrama Morley looked on as a ceramics artist shattered pieces on the ground only to work them into new pieces on the fly. "It was a simple but effective metaphor for the continual reconstruction that Lebanese designers must take on," he says. More important than the act of preservation, or sealing an object in time as to crystallize it into some kind of gesamtkunstwerk, is the practice itself of destruction in the name of perpetual renewal.

Those holding the keys to the masterworks of the Nordics, including Faber at Louis Poulsen, do not enjoy this kind of liberty. (Although it is exhilarating to imagine Carl Hansen & Søn sledgehammering a Wishbone chair and puzzling it into some kind of new seating and the horror devotees of the Danish designer might suffer.) In Stockholm, it was apparent that heritage brands were grappling with how, exactly, they might evolve. Often, a brand’s biggest obstacle is its own legacy, and the farther back it reaches, it seems, the more difficult to stray from its core offering: In celebration of its 300th anniversary, Rörstrand, the Swedish tableware brand, only now released a colorway that marks a meaningful departure from its usual greens and blues, a caramel tone called Jubilee. (For tea cup sets gifted to press, including this writer, it was the classic blue.)

For brands dealing in the golden age of modernism, an archive is its backbone. "Given the region’s impressive, artistic, and groundbreaking legacy, this is only natural," Louis Poulsen’s Faber said. At an exhibit in Stockholm specifically celebrating archival work, there were rechargeable, portable versions of famous table lamps: Verner Panton’s Panthella, and the PH series, by Poul Henningsen, which also turns 100 this year. A 2025 release flexed the archive, too: Faber showed the VL 45 Radiohus, an orb-like portable light based on a late-’30s pendant by Vilhelm Lauritzen. The lamp, as with the original, has all the sublime trappings of Scandi comfort: serene, safe, and sedate.

Faber acknowledges that a brand’s defining designs can overshadow new work, but ideally, they "should serve as a point of reference and inspiration, without setting boundaries," she says. One exercise in such is a collaboration with designer Gabriel Tan, whose studio operates in Porto and Singapore (distant shores, as Ferm Living’s Materna suggested) and hews to the classics: with Herman Miller he made the Luva, a plump, modular sofa that references Vico Magstretti’s Maralunga sofa. With Faber, Tan introduced the Rumee light, a satisfying addition to Poulsen’s usual table lamp spread. Where a Flowerpot and Panthella cast an even, orbital glow, the Rumee, about the same size as those, is directional and hand held, adorably anthropomorphic in how it faces one way; Tan uses one to read to his kids, he says.

Doe-eyed in comparison to Louis Poulsen or other legacy Scandi brands, Ferm Living, founded in 2005, doesn’t have a bar-setting archive it needs to check in with (just everyone else’s, perhaps). This puts it in a unique position from which to advance the Scandinavian conversation, and so does bringing in the perspective of Phillip Materna. He left his native Canada in the late 2010s for a position at Michael Anastassiades Studio in London, and has since had a hand in producing several design objects from the likes of Herman Miller, B&B Italia, and Cassina. At a distinct remove from Scandi design, he’s been able to repackage elements of its legacy into something refreshing, if not completely unburdened from clichés. With Ferm, he wants to show that Danish design isn’t all minimalism and simplicity, he says. A black, ash-wood credenza from the brand’s upcoming spring/summer collection is one example: still a strict wood box, its scalloped facade is delightfully disorganized, as if the effect of some natural process that leaves the results to chance.

Materna feels that a lot of the perception that Nordic design is boring is swayed by how most of us now digest design, through small screens instead of in real life; brazenness will stop you mid-scroll before anything else does, whether you ultimately award it a double-tap or not. But the real test is the IRL application, said Materna: the felt experience of quality and function win out over virtual ostentatiousness, and are what give an object any kind of longevity. 

But one could argue that that’s no longer the age we’re living in. In the attention economy, the virtual has immense value, even if we’re loath to admit it. Life no longer plays out under the cover of privacy in our homes—we broadcast our living spaces for clout, leverage them for income, and in some cases design them for others’ attention more than for ourselves. Furniture exhibitions, too, operate on these terms. Salone del Mobile, the Super Bowl of furniture fairs, held in Milan in the spring, has become an attention vortex in recent years as brand activations by fashion houses draw more crowds than even the best furniture installations, and queues form for gram-worthy moments more than just a really great kitchen, say, however exciting one might be. (The longest line I stood in at the 2024 edition of the Salone was not for furniture—it was for the late director David Lynch’s presentation, which, as far as I can remember, included as many as two chairs.) 

If Stockholm’s design week had anything engineered for Instagram, it came from Stockholm Creative Edition, which bills itself as its own design week. At a press preview inside a gallery-ified fifth floor of a building designed by Ragnar Östberg, who also designed Stockholm’s city hall, completed in 1923, a pert energy on the part of its presenters seemed to vaporize any anxieties surrounding Scandi design: Here it was, in full force, in spite of the city’s furniture fair taking a year off to regroup for its 75th anniversary—who says the region’s output is passé? (By comparison, the fair is more of a conventional trade show, held at a literal convention center.) On display was an exuberance unbridled from expectation; some of it could have used some reining in, as with a desperately colorful and imposing textile work devoid of apparent provenance. But other pieces were playfully irreverent of the region’s elders, as with a series of benches and bookshelves hewn from cheap doors. A trio of geometric lamps softly glowing in amber and yellow hues counterbalanced engineered silhouettes with delicate, colored thread and pulpy paper. A coffee table, lounge, and chair sculpted from wood looked like frozen water.

Its designer, woodworker Niklas Runesson, offered a perspective on how modern design should function in a part of the world where improving upon it is eternally difficult. "I absolutely believe in timeless design. There’s no reason to create yet another dining chair when so many brilliant, expressive, and well-thought-out chairs have already been designed," he says. "But you can still challenge it with new forms on a smaller scale." Which is to say, even if the apex has already been reached, the fun now is in distorting that reality. And sometimes, perhaps often, with an effect meant to get people to pull out their phones.

Maybe that was what Erik Rimmer was getting at with his very loaded question, at the dinner celebrating Verner Panton. Was not enough being done within the Nordics to challenge its own legacy? In another reading, you could sense a justified smugness—we know nothing can really top this stuff, he seemed to say, but let’s have a little fun and pretend for a moment that something could. In that view, the chrome room felt something more like armor, the shiny, social media–worthy spectacle a defense against irrelevance. But even if you stripped the space of its clicky veneer, all you’d be left with is, oh, just some of the most famous lamps, chairs, and pendants to ever exist, belonging to something that won’t be soon be forgotten: a profound and enduring design legacy that might always feel a little bit boring.

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