Chrystina Schmidt: Northern lights
Meeting Chrystina Schmidt, founder of Nordic design store Skandium
Above: Skandium founders Chrystina Schmidt and Magnus Englund at home
When Skandium first opened on Wigmore Street ten years ago, Sir Norman Foster spotted it from a passing taxi, jumped out and rushed inside. “Finally! Finally! We have Modernism in London,” he cried, congratulating the shop’s owners Chrystina and Magnus on their work. “And you know,” says Chrystina, “If he congratulates me then at least I’ve done something right.”
Subsequently, Chrystina Schmidt’s Modernist dream expanded to a stylish store in Marylebone High Street and a concession in Selfridges that has now been replaced with a vast store on Brompton Road, opened last year as part of the ongoing revitalisation of Brompton Cross. It has a dedicated following and has inspired a real love in London for Nordic design and its simple, practical pieces that fuse form and function in seamless, stylish shapes.
It all started in 1998 when Finnish-born Chrystina and her Swedish partner Magnus Englund spotted a cooking pot in Finland. Its simple, perfect and unadorned shape struck them and the pot seemed to be “the Gucci of pots, the epitome of Modernism”. They were living in London, both working in fashion and disillusioned with it, and looking for something else to do. So they thought they’d try something with the pot. “We thought, let’s do the story of Modernism from Avar Aalto to Hackman Tools [the pot range], let’s create a United Nations of Scandinavian design.” A shop, they dreamed, selling beautiful, functional things with quality craftsmanship and a story to tell.
Through books they tracked down various factories in Sweden, Denmark and Finland that still had pieces in production that were designed throughout the 20th century and became increasingly enthusiastic, despite being a less than optimal business bet in the eyes of the bank. “We were foreigners with no business records and very little money so nobody wanted to give us a lease,” says Chrystina. The only shop they could find was a derelict site on Wigmore Street that had been empty for four years and was so badly water damaged that it took Chrystina and Magnus a year of working around their day jobs, with help from her father visiting from Finland, to make it inhabitable. But the love of the project kept them going, right? “Well, once we’d started there was so much at stake that we had to carry on. The love came later really. It almost killed us, working around the clock.” The simple shop dream was proving to be much more hard work than they’d thought, and a decade later, it’s still an all-consuming undertaking.
Still, the first shop was an instant success with the press, and with Norman Foster, and with interior designers all over the capital. After all, Chrystina sees Scandinavian modernism’s roots in the UK’s arts and crafts movement, whose magazine The Studio had an avid following among Swedish intellectuals. “Modernism isn’t just things, it’s thinking,” says Chrystina, and the main thing about everything she sells at Skandium is that there’s a story behind each piece. That’s a line used by Habitat too, says Chrystina a bit snootily, but with Skandium there really is the weight of craftsmanship and history attached to everything. The cups we are drinking out of, for instance, large and sleek plain white ceramic pieces, are deceptively simple. “These cups were designed for Iittala by Kaj Franck, the architect behind the new form for Finland in 1952, who was working on creating accessible tableware at a time when people were seeking new forms for everything.” The cups, still made by Finnish company Iittala, form part of a mix and match series whereby everything fits together in an endless series of combinations and is all brilliantly stackable to suit the space restraints of a newly urban society.
Industrialisation started in Sweden in the 1930s and people moved from the countryside to the city; Stockholm was overcrowded and households were small, so items were designed to be multi-purpose and stackable for easy storage. This started a tradition throughout Scandinavia, and Iittala still produces many of its original designs, which have inspired countless copies over the years. “Every Scandinavian household is based on Iittala products, glass and crockery,” says Chrystina, and though the range could be found in London before Skandium, it was never fashionable or displayed with reference to its heritage. Skandium’s basic idea was to display products alongside a picture of their designers and the story of their inception, and to celebrate the process of design at every stage.
Craftsmanship fell out of fashion in the 1960s, when design was branded bourgeois and cheap imports from India became standard homeware. Many industries closed down, and some skills were lost. Iittala was one of the few that carried on, never ceasing to produce Avar Aalto’s iconic glass vases and the crockery that Scandinavia depended on. Modernism’s simple, practical elegance has increased in popularity dramatically in the past 10 years, and Skandium is in tune with the zeitgeist. The shop’s customers are very intellectual, very international, says Chrystina, and they don’t tend to sell to people who happen to pass. “This glass costs £5.50,” she says, indicating one of Iittala’s simple blue glass tumblers. “And if people don’t have any relationship with it or a love of the Iittala story, they’ll go and get a cheaper copy somewhere else, which is fine.”
In the new Brompton Road store, Skandium plans to extend its remit to include design pieces from outside Scandinavia. Chrystina is enormously excited about working with Cassina, an Italian company that split from B&B Italia in a dramatic family rift decades ago. Its craftspeople continue to make high bespoke furniture in a little village outside Milan. “It still has a lot of heritage pieces in terms of international Modernism, though some of them will go out of production soon. Gio Ponti’s Superleggera chair, for instance, is quite an icon but there are only two ladies in south Italy who can still make the seats because they’re woven in a specific way. That chair will probably go because you can’t machine make it and Cassina only produces with original crafts people.”
Chrystina and Magnus have lived in a small but predictably stylish rented flat in Marylebone for years, all the while searching for somewhere to buy. “We’re always flat hunting,” laments Chrystina. But the London property market defeats them – “You’ve got to have time to run around, and I don’t. Anyway everywhere’s just so disappointing. Especially the crap they sell in Notting Hill. You’ll visit an £800,000 flat and the communal hallway will look like a squat, with naked lightbulbs and scribbles on the wall, and still they’ll be asking for thousands of pounds of service charge. And the solicitors’ fees! Still, I love London, it’s just terribly tiresome and it eats you up.”
Chrystina and Magnus spend almost all their waking hours on Skandium, which despite its smooth, glossy feel is still very much a small business and a labour of love for all involved. Their odyssey with Modernism has led them to become experts in their field and Chrystina and Magnus co-authored Scandinavian Modern and Scandinavian Country, books on the modern Scandinavian home. Their own flat is a model of Nordic beauty and illustrates, like that first pot, the Gucci of flats, the essence of Modernism. Visit the Brompton Road store and transform your London home into a Stockholm space.
Skandium
247 Brompton Road SW3
86 Marylebone High Street W1
www.skandium.com