Icon, December 2015

My first feature for Icon Magazine, Nedre Foss Gård, a story about an Oslo bar created by product designers Anderssen & Voll, appeared in the December issue.

What happens when you let product designers loose on a bar and restaurant interior? If it’s Norwegian design studio Anderssen & Voll, they custom-design every single item.

“The chairs, the tables, the lamps, even the window and door profiles, were all designed especially for Nedre Foss Gård,” said co-founder Torbjörn Anderssen. “We designed absolutely everything apart from the toilets and a few of the door handles.”

The history of the site, which includes a water mill from 1148 until 1986 and a building which dates back to 1802 – provided their starting point. With such a long timespan, the team pinpointed an imaginary Swedish noble family living in the space in 1910, who holidayed in Paris, with Chinese and Japanese influences. “It’s very different from what we normally do,” said Anderssen, who is known for contemporary Scandinavian product design “but it was liberating to draw inspiration from pre-Bauhaus and indulge ourselves in S-curves.”

The solid oak chairs used throughout the bar are based on a classic Chinese design. Brass and marble wine coolers, the “double-hatted” brass lamps and a dazzling cluster of hand-hammered brass pendants, help to create the “cosy” atmosphere Scandinavians are known for, while a complicated system of pipes dubbed the “copper organ” delivers the 12 beers brewed on site directly to customer’s glasses.

The project has inspired ‘Nedre Foss’ a new product line from the studio, the first launch from which is Ildhane, a cast iron candlestick available from twenty-twenty-one.