I could think of uncanny pairings, but even so I would undoubtedly fail to come up with Swedish/Spanish. Despite my lack of vision, there is indeed a Swedish/Spanish design studio (based in Sweden) called cate & nelson. The odd duo has “a desire to affect people aesthetically, emotionally, existentially and poetically with our projects.” Their new Hug Chair does just that. While it does not appear to be a flatpack piece, it is.

Hug Chair. Designed by cate & nelson.

Since Hug Chair is hiding something, I am intrigued from the start. Doesn’t everyone love a good mystery? An unraveling? cate & nelson “have taken the best possible advantage of the strengths of formpressed techniques to create a sturdy low chair with flat-pack design principles.”

Constructed from one formpressed sheet, Hug Chair does not require tools for its assembly. Instead, it has buttons. Ever important buttons that “function not only as decoration but most importantly; they hold the chair together” (that’s their semi-colon error, not mine, but we’ll forgive them for this–maybe semi-colons are used as a type of super comma in Sweden).

The result is a dynamic, modern piece that pays tribute to mid-century lounge chairs, some of which are true ancestors due to their Scandinavian origins. Wide, curvy, and ever so smooth, the lines of the Hug Chair make me want to indulge in some late afternoon sloth. It invites me to fold my legs beneath me in the crossed position of a yogi and dream of Ale’s Stones, the monolithic monument/stone ship in Southern Sweden–which is itself a duality almost as bizarre as that of cate & nelson.