Lammhults

About

Lammhults is a Swedish furniture manufacturer based in the village of Lammhult in Småland, southern Sweden, that makes chairs, armchairs, easy chairs, sofas, modular seating, barstools, stools, tables, bar tables, trolleys and accessories for workplaces and meeting spaces. The company trades as Lammhults Möbel AB and dates its founding to 1945. Its factory, offices and a large showroom share a single site on the outskirts of the village, at Växjövägen 41, in the area the company calls the Kingdom of Furniture. The founder was Edvin Ståhl, born in Lammhult in 1896. By the company's own account, Ståhl and his brothers started a furniture business in the late 1920s making pieces for home and office environments; that company was sold on to KF, Sweden's cooperative society, with Ståhl staying on to run it. In 1945 he set up a small mechanical workshop in Lammhult that produced fittings and other details for the furniture makers around it. About ten years later he began designing and producing furniture in the workshop himself, and the business was renamed Lammhults Möbel AB. His first pieces were a stool called 282 and a chair series named Pyramid, both with frames of bent steel tubing; the company says he wanted them to be practical and to have a clear and simple design. Collections are developed with outside designers, whom the company names individually. In 1965 Lammhults asked Börge Lindau and Bo Lindekrantz to design a chair for public use; the pair offered two, Ritz and Royal, and the collaboration lasted two decades. The Danish designers Johannes Foersom and Peter Hiort-Lorenzen have worked with the company since the mid-1980s. Gunilla Allard entered Konstfack in Stockholm in 1983 and, on graduating in 1988, was one of five students chosen for a student workshop arranged by Lammhults; she became the company's first female designer and worked with it for thirty years. The others on the company's designer roster are Andrés Nilson, Anya Sebton, Gustav Winsth, Julia Läufer and Marcus Keichel, Note, Note + Allard, Peter Andersson and Troels Grum-Schwensen. Several long-running models remain in the catalogue. Taburett is a reissue of the 282 stool, designed by Edvin Ståhl in 1955; it has a frame of 16 mm chromium-plated or powder-coated steel tubing, a seat in ABS plastic or upholstery, and an embossed seat detail in die-cast zinc. The S70 collection by Lindau and Lindekrantz was launched in 1968 and originally comprised twelve items, from ashtrays and coat hangers to tables and chairs; the common element was steel tubing of an unusually large diameter, which gave the series its name. The S70-4 easy chair and S70-5 sofa were reintroduced in 2012 on a frame of 35 mm chromium-plated or powder-coated tube. Campus, by Foersom and Hiort-Lorenzen in 1992, was drawn as an affordable volume chair for the international contract market: it stacks and links, comes on a four-leg or sled base, and uses a 16 mm steel tube frame with seat and back in ash or oak veneer or in upholstery. Cinema, by Gunilla Allard, dates from 1994, and the Add side table by Anya Sebton from 2013. The company states that it has been certified to ISO 14001 for environmental management since 1998 and to ISO 9001 for quality since 2012, and that it also holds the ISO 45001 certificate for occupational health and safety; these are company-level management-system certificates. At product level it works with Möbelfakta, the Swedish furniture label run by Möbelfakta Sverige AB, a subsidiary of IVL Swedish Environmental Institute and the wood and furniture trade body TMF, which covers quality, environment and social responsibility and is a Type I ecolabel under ISO 14024. Lammhults says over 85 per cent of its product families, or versions of them, are certified according to Möbelfakta, and Lammhults Möbel AB appears in the scheme's public register. The company has also published thirty environmental product declarations covering more than 110 product variants, independently reviewed by EPD Norway and held in its register; the declaration for the Grade chair carries the number NEPD-7767-7137 and was registered in October 2024 with validity to October 2029. Steel, textile, aluminium, plastics and wood are named as the main materials, and the company says it strives to avoid composite materials and aims to use only non-compound ones. It offers spare parts and restoration through a programme it calls RE:USE, and has two circular concepts for renewing worn furniture, either on site by the owner or by sending the piece to its production facility. Lammhults Möbel has belonged to the listed group now called Lammhults Design Group since 1994, when the Småland business group Sydostinvest, which included Lammhults Möbel, was bought by a regional investment company started in 1988 under the name Bergkronan and afterwards renamed Rörviksgruppen. That group was split into two separately listed companies in 1997; the design and furniture side, R-vik Industrigrupp, acquired Expanda in 1999 and took its name, and Expanda changed its name again in 2008 to Lammhults Design Group to emphasise the company's roots. The group's share trades on Nasdaq Stockholm Small Cap, its registered office is also in Lammhult, at Lammengatan 2, and Susanna Hilleskog is its chief executive. It is organised into two business areas, Office Interiors and Library Interiors, and its brands are Abstracta, Fora Form, Lammhults, Morgana, Ragnars and BCI / Schulz Speyer / Eurobib Direct. The furniture is specified for offices, meeting and conference rooms, other public interiors and domestic settings, and is available through the brand's own website and its dealers.