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ad.retur at the Stockholm Furniture Fair

Alcro at Stockholm Furniture Fair

For this year’s Alcro Designers Collection, the paint manufacturer challenged ten students from Beckman’s College of Design to breathe new life into old pieces of furniture, using nothing but a lick of paint. The result is the ad.retur collection.

Alcro at Stockholm Furniture Fair

Slate, by Susanne Ringstrom was one of my favorite pieces. She started by painting these wooden drawers white, and inspired by early military typewriters, she used a stencil to add a vintage green typewriter. Then, in a bid to provide a permanent home for all the notes and lists that usually end up on scraps of paper and post-it notes, she added a blackboard stripe like a reel of paper flowing out of the typewriter. Beautiful – and functional.

Alcro at Stockholm Furniture Fair

Alcro at Stockholm Furniture Fair

Kajsa Lindstrom’s Scrabble Box was once a cabinet her father bought on impulse for 25 kronor, that had been gathering dust under the stairs ever since. Inspired by the board games gathering dust under the same stairs, she created a nostalgic cabinet, with magnetic movable letters, that begs you to play with it.

Alcro at Stockholm Furniture Fair

Joel Sandelius wanted to add value and a personal connection to this simple IKEA table by mimicking the silhouette of a gold Rococo table.

Alcro at Stockholm Furniture Fair

My other favorite piece, Shadow by Andreas Frienholt, was inspired by a moment of serendipity. The sun shone through a classroom window and cast beautiful shadows across the chair. Andreas simply painted on the shadows.

He’s used quite a subtle color palate, so on first glance you might not even notice what he’s done, but he encourages other people to have a go and perhaps be bolder; “you can certainly experiment with brighter colors, too. It’s old furniture… so if one fails with a wooden chair, it is not the whole world, right?”

See the rest of the collection here.

Our trip to Stockholm for the Stockholm Furniture Fair 2012 was supported in part by Airbnb.com.

Katie Treggiden is a purpose-driven journalist, author and, podcaster championing a circular approach to design – because Planet Earth needs better stories. She is also the founder and director of Making Design Circular, a program and membership community for designer-makers who want to join the circular economy. With 20 years' experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, Crafts Magazine and Monocle24 – as well as being Editor at Large for Design Milk. She is currently exploring the question ‘can craft save the world?’ through an emerging body of work that includes her fifth book, Wasted: When Trash Becomes Treasure (Ludion, 2020), and a podcast, Circular with Katie Treggiden.