Written by Rod Bradbury, and published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE No. 1, 2011. See here for subscription details - members of FoD are eligible for a 10% discount!

Monica Förster

I managed to catch Monica Förster between the Stockholm Furniture Fair and a trip to Paris. Now regarded as one of the top names in Swedish design, Monica is based in Stockholm but works with many international companies such as Cappellini, Poltrona Frau, De Padova, Tacchini, Modus etc. She even finds time to teach design in Sweden as well as abroad.

Monica comes from the far north of Sweden, where her mother and father ran a restaurant where her father was the chef. They only used local produce and all the ingredients came from the mountains around Dorotea.

Living close to the Arctic Circle in a very small town meant there wasn’t much modern design in her local environment but her parents’ restaurant involved a lot of artistry in food, taste, colours and lots of experiments.

As a teenager she spent a year in Phoenix, Arizona, where she played volleyball five hours a day, before finishing her schooling in Sweden. Still in the north.

Was she already thinking about becoming a designer? ‘No,’ says Monica, ‘I did admittedly go to Umeå for a year to art school. But I have never really felt that I fitted in, not even in art school. I was still very young and trying to find my way in life, a bit insecure perhaps. And then I went on an international programme arranged by Stockholm University but where you studied abroad, in Munich, Paris and London, studying languages, business and economics, which in fact turned out to be very useful later, but I must have been the worst student they ever had… too much of a rebel.’

Back in Sweden, she then applied to Beckmans School of Design in Stockholm after working a few years at a graphic design agency and as an assistant art director. ‘I was studying Graphic Design, although I actually only did three-dimensional design,’ says Monica. ‘I have always been self-propelled, done my own thing, and if we were assigned the task of making a magazine I would build something, but the teachers were so wonderful in letting me work with my own ideas.’ Beckmans was followed by a period at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Konstfack.

During her studies, Monica did practical work at Kosta Boda glassworks a few times and also did an internship with people working with enamel. All her experiments led to some quite good projects and she even exhibited in a gallery in Södermalm and the lamp she designed was shown in Milan. After Konstfack she got a grant which made it possible for her to start her own business.

‘My background from Beckmans, which is more idea-based, has meant that I work in many different areas. Two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional. That’s how I like to work, and I can end up with any material. It’s all about the idea I want to express, and then the material and everything else adapts to that.’

Now her design studio is well established. ‘We are so incredibly busy and we work almost always with commissions. Perhaps I’ve been extremely lucky, but I have had some wonderful clients. There is a brief, of course, and there are parameters for the materials, but they say they would like me to propose something – a conversation piece – in fact I haven’t had one single boring assignment. But from a creative point of view it is important to do your own things as well, where you have no limits at all. To my mind, you can see it like this: I am very curious about things so every new project is interesting because all the time I’m learning something new and that makes you develop.’

‘Design work is also about people, and enjoying working together, sometimes it takes 2 to 3 years to develop a product and I couldn’t stick with working conditions where I had to go home at the end of the day in a bad mood if I was working with a terrible client. But my clients look at design in the same way that I do, so there aren’t really any arguments, we all have the same goal, we are all thinking about the project. The people I work with in these companies are all very skilled and they give me the possibility to do my job in the best possible way. It is very much a back-and-forth process. And their knowledge of materials and techniques gives me wonderful opportunities that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. I might be the “face” but it is also a team thing.’

She would like to get more involved in industrial design. She elaborates on this: ‘I try to put in some poetry in what I do, and it would be really interesting to do that in hard-core industrial design. To combine sensibility and poetry within the object. And I am now tending to get that kind of assignment… perhaps designing a coffee-maker, a hair dryer… it would be interesting to be able to work with a more personalised mass production.’

Although mainly designing for production, she has also done some one-offs. A new project for Svenskt Tenn in Stockholm has included handmade jewellery boxes, nine unique pieces, made from wood with a lacquered finish. But she likes working with mass-produced things, making well-designed articles available for a lot of people.

Nowadays, Monica works quite a lot abroad and is often in Italy. Her school Latin and French are a big help, she says: ‘I get by pretty well. I can communicate with craftsmen and technicians in Italian, but it requires a lot of concentration and is quite exhausting. Some time I must go on a proper language course!’

I asked Monica how she has managed being a mother with a young child while running a design studio. ‘Of course, it hasn’t been easy. At one point my son’s father actually told me that I wasn’t going to work any more, it was sort of: “Now that you have a son, you are not going to have a career”. So I decided that I was going to show him… I was going to take care of my son and I am going to have a career. At the same time. And I just arranged my life to make it possible.’

They split up, she sold her flat and moved so that her new flat, the kindergarten and design studio were all within two minutes of each other. She explains: ‘I took everything into account. My new flat was in a building from the 1960s with a huge lift – I didn’t want to have to use the stairs because my son was only two years old and I reckoned I would be so tired all the time that I would simplify my life so that when I pick him up after day-care and would be carrying food too, then no way was I going to squander my last energy on dragging a pram up lots of stairs! And I wasn’t going to spend time commuting to work; I was going to spend that time working instead. So it was very deliberate planning.’

Although her parents live in the far north of the country, when she had to travel for her work, her mother would come down to Stockholm and look after her son. ‘That was a really big help. And we have some really good friends too. A good network has helped a lot. But even so, for two whole years all I did was take care of my son and work. I didn’t go out. I didn’t even drink a glass of wine because I had to be so sharp and concentrated on what I was doing. I wanted to make sure my son grew up feeling secure. I was of course often incredibly tired, but it was a question of priorities.’

Nowadays, Monica manages to combine her design studio and a family life, and her partner is a musician who understands creative work and who has flexible working hours too. ‘And I have an extremely reliable babysitter. But my son is very independent too, and I think that is something that he has got from me,’ she says.

At the moment she is working on cutlery design, and is starting on a really big project with porcelain. Both with Swedish companies but with international markets. ‘And for De Padova we are doing the Florinda chair which is a mix of plastic and wood with a simple shape for the wooden legs while giving more emphasis to the upper plastic part. And a new large standard lamp for Vibia, a very innovative Barcelona-based company – a new textile technique is used for the organic lamp shade allowing an advanced double curved design, playing with the light.’

Before her next appointment, Monica takes me to the temporary Svenskt Tenn showrooms in the centre of Stockholm. In the old cinema, together with Björn Kusoffsky, Monica has made a personal interpretation of a pattern by Josef Frank, Marble 4420. Using that as a starting point, they have applied the design to a series of products and used it in a video installation.

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE No. 1, 2011. It was written by Rod Bradbury, photos by Monica Förster Design Studio.