Nobody's perfect

Nobody's a great idea. The chair Nobody, that is. Made out of mouldable felt, the chair designed by Danish-Russian duo Komplot Design and produced by Danish furniture company Hay, has caused quite a stir. Not only because it’s probably the first completely self-supporting textile chair that’s ever existed, and therefor light, sound proof and easy to recycle. But because it is something as unusual as a chair carefully created from fiber to product – in the same place.
The mouldable felt is produced in Halmstad, in the south of Sweden, by Nordifa, the same manufacturer that thermo-press the material into a chair. It contains felt fibres mixed with polyester fibres from old soft drink bottles and is a material that has been used for ages in cars luggage lockers and other such low- glamorous places. But nobody ever thought of using it for making a chair. Until Komplot Design, who had been collaborating with the Nordifa for a long time, happened to hear about the machine that can mould felt in the same way one usually mould wood… Now, that’s the kind of thing that would never have happened if the chair had been produced in China. The shape of the chair was born in the same minute the designers understood about the machine opportunity.
Swedish designers are now standing in line to work with the material. At the up-coming Stockholm Furniture Fair (Feb 4th-8th) there will be several new products in mouldable felt. I'll come back to this.