Step stepladder

It was certainly no accident that Karl Malmvall became a furniture designer. He more or less grew up in Karl Andersson & Sons’ furniture factory in Huskvarna, a firm started by his grandfather and for which his own father designed furniture. After studying at the Carl Malmsten school in Stockholm and the Aarhus architectural college in Denmark, Karl was discovered by Gillis Lundgren who was one of Ivar Kamprad’s closest collaborators. This resulted in two decades of working at IKEA, initially at the furniture giant’s design office in Switzerland and thereafter in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The years that he spent at IKEA stimulated an interest in the practical details of design that few designers devote much attention to: creating a product that not only works well but that is also well adapted to manufacture and distribution.

Over the years Karl has acquired a notable collection of such items and it was the prototype of a folding chair that he presented when he first met with Design House Stockholm’s founder and managing director Anders Färdig.