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D W E L L I N G W I T H D E S I G N
78
after Ikea products), appeared to be designs by Alvar Aalto. For instance, Rea,
Kalle & Emma, Hannele, Janne, Theo, Laura and Liisa all had furniture or vases
by Alvar Aalto, and usually more than one piece in the apartment. Regarding
Ikea, only Laura, Olavi, Hannele, Mervi and Sakari did not show me any
Ikea products. In addition to the products mentioned above, the households
had a number of products by Hackman/Iittala/Arabia and Marimekko, but, as
far as I was able to recognise, most of the products were either vintage or reproduced
designs. Suffice to say that only a fraction of all the products that the
households chose to talk about were contemporary designs by living Finnish
designers, and even within that selection, some had little value for the household
(Olavi’s saucepan, Hannele’s Lundia).
For the most part, though, the interviewees talked about the products with
affection. They liked the products and the designs often had long histories
within the family: it was easy to talk about them. In Finland, some designers
and companies (such as Alvar Aalto, Tapio Wirkkala, Kaj Franck and Marimekko)
have become names by which one can expect others to immediately
understand large parts of the design’s connotations. For example, Asta and
Theo (who do not like modernist Finnish design), Jari (who “knows nothing
about design”) and the Ylinen family (who were opposed design brands and
commercialisation in general) spontaneously (and fluently) talked about Aalto,
Skanno and Pentik without further explanations. Here is the Ylinen family
recalling the biography of their now extinct sofa:
Father:
Before I got married I wanted it [his one-room apartment] to be a
real bachelor pad. It was kind of bluish-violet, all the ceilings and
walls were painted, on one wall, with a window, there was a yellow
Indian cotton curtain covering the whole wall. Then I bought a foam
sofa from Skanno which was, like, four squares but they’d been sawn
like this [shows], and it was, was it 60–70 centimetres?
Mother:
Ordinary sitting height.
F: Well roughly 50–centimetre thick superlon. When you lifted it, you
could make a back-rest out of it, too. And then even the closet doors
in the entrance hall had to be painted in reddish orange.
M: the wave
F: Yeah, a wave on that door, all four of the doors there. But then it was
left a bit unfinished when these folks arrived.