CARL MALMSTEN. “August”, armchair, designed 1938.

Branded. Recently re-dressed. Height 105 cm. Seat height 38 cm. Width 75 cm.

Designed in 1938, August was one of the Malmsten armchairs exhibited in the Swedish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The exhibition marked the beginning of the Swedish Modern style. Other Malmsten furniture exhibited there included Jonas Love, and Erik Gustaf, and Carl Malmsten explained the names like this: “Jonas Love was at the New York expo in 1939. In the same year, Hitler arranged for a second world war. Swedish hearts clapped anxiously and swedish. So it happened that chairs were named after Swedish greats, such as Erik Gustaf (Geijer) and Jonas Love (Almqvist).”

In the past, people talked about Carl Malmsten as a designer who used virtually all existing furniture styles throughout history, and from that came his own unmistakable Carl Malmsten style: the friendly enveloping, rounded shapes, the good craftsmanship, the respect for the material.

Today, with the new interest in Swedish Grace (sometimes referred to as Swedish Art Deco) and Swedish Modern, Carl Malmsten is increasingly mentioned as a unifying link, the connection between these two styles.

Many of his lavish interiors from the 1920s can be said to define Swedish Grace (for example, the Crown Prince couple's living room at Ulriksdal Castle). Similarly, the furniture models he exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair give a good picture of Swedish Modern, as a distinctive Swedish combination of modernism and tradition.

Carl Malmsten had his real breakthrough after the exhibition Living Tradition at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg in 1956. It was then that they were shown for the first time, many of the armchairs and sofas we today so clearly associate with Carl Malmsten: Grandma, Hemmak, Little Sister, Husmor, Interplay... Carl Malmsten now moved away from precious luxury production of single furniture to a more industrial production, where the quality of craftsmanship and materials was nevertheless observed. The result was that his furniture was spread to a much larger audience and that he himself received the epithet “folk home designer”.

Carl Malmsten was versatile and prolific, he is said to have left behind more than 20,000 sketches and drawings and his almost endless rows of furniture models are barely visible.
In the end, just one armchair will suffice. The only question is which one? Grandma? The Alderman? Our wife? August? Home night? Lazy Count? Yeah, it might not matter. Whatever you choose, you sit comfortably, you sit safely, and you sit for a long time in a Carl Malmsten armchair.