Artek is an iconic, 91-year-old Finnish furniture company; Hender Scheme a renowned, 15-year-old Japanese leather shoemaker. After several years of talking, experimenting, and getting to know each other and their crafts, they created a compact joint collection that launches next month.
Its most immediately striking idea? Shoes for furniture. The bent-birch legs of Alvar Aalto’s Stool 60 and Table 90C, two staples of organic modernism, now slip into little handmade vegetable-tanned leather covers inspired by storm-welt construction, a technique used to make footwear more resistant to water. “We are shoemakers,” says Hender Scheme founder and designer Ryo Kashiwazaki, “so why don’t we make shoes for a stool?”
Simple as that sounds, if you look closer, a deeper story starts to unfold. Artek and Hender Scheme approach natural materials in much the same way: the older they get, the better. Artek’s “wild birch,” for example, retains knots and insect trails; Hender Scheme’s vegetable-tanned leather comes with its scars and stretch marks intact. Neither company is interested in ironing out those irregularities.
That attitude extends to their design philosophies, too. When it comes to the “natural aging of materials,” Kashiwazaki says, the trick is “to not treat too much.” Over time, Hender Scheme’s pale leather darkens and develops a patina, just as Artek’s birch gradually changes color. The point, they believe, is to let that happen.
Kashiwazaki brought much the same thinking to Artek’s famous designs. Working with nearly a century of design legacy he deeply respects, his instinct was to tread lightly. “Try not to do too much,” he says, “but also try to add something very small, yet very different.”
That’s apparent in the stool and table, obviously. But elsewhere in the collection, the interventions are even more subtle. The leather clock, key holder, and coasters, for instance, take their shape from Aino Aalto’s Riihitie ceramic plant pots, which she designed in 1937 for the terrace of the Helsinki home she shared with Alvar.
The Pendant Lamp A330 Golden Bell — originally introduced in the 1950s — takes an equally subtle yet technically more involved approach. Its three-piece leather shade is wet-formed over a 3D-printed mold. That mix of old and new is central to what Kashiwazaki calls “new craft”: rather than simply preserving traditional techniques like wet-forming, he prefers to use them freely and alongside new technology.
Kashiwazaki is happy with where the collaboration has landed. But for him, the real test comes much later. Furniture, he points out, can have a life measured in decades, sometimes even centuries. His dream is to see one of the pieces turn up in Artek’s Helsinki Second Cycle store, where the company resells used furniture, in “20 or 30 years.”
“If this product gets back there one day and someone buys it, that would be really great,” he says.
For now, though, they’ll have to start out new. Following a preview in Paris last June, the Artek x Hender Scheme collection will make its public debut at Vitra’s Tramshed showroom in Shoreditch during the London Design Festival, where it will be on view from September 15 to 19. It launches globally on October 10.
