At NYCxDESIGN: Friends & Founders

At NYCxDESIGN: Friends & Founders

Friends & Founders is a name that tells a story. In brief, Rasmus and Ida L. Hildebrand met back in 2008 during Stockholm Design week. Their mutual love of furniture design morphed into romance and partnership and finally into the concept behind their brand.

Friends & Founders Knockout Dining Table circular top in marble with heavy marble base
Friends & Founders Knockout Dining Table

The name embodies collegiality and collaboration, not only between the Hildebrand duo but also within all the relationships that typify the process of design, manufacture, and delivery to consumer; thus, between designer and artisan, company and consume, art and craft, raw material and manipulation of it, the natural world and all we extract, shape, form, and create.

Friends & Founders La Lampe simple round translucent bulb with thin rodlike stem floor, wall, and pendant lamps
La Lampe

The aesthetic of the Collection builds on this idea. Influenced by the Bauhaus and the primacy of simple geometric forms, designer Ida aspires towards minimalist pieces with visible structure from basic materials that endure.

Friends & Founders Miró Miró mirror on  a marble wall
MIró MIró

Though the aesthetic underpinnings are Scandinavian, Friends & Founders embraces and expresses diverse influences. Miró Miró above is one such example. Apart from the clever wordplay that credits Spanish (Catalan) painter Joan Miró, the collection of mirrors evokes an essential quality of his art: the interplay of basic—even childlike—forms to suggest movement and play.

Friends & Founders Miró Miró mirror oval shaped with a small circular shelf attached at the bottom

The SAW Collection also begins with an iconic shape. The humble picnic table is given figurative and literal gravitas by emphasizing the surface slab, two beautifully crafted lengths of FSC-certified wood perched atop a thin v-frame, thus calling attention to the top while provoking admiration for the innate engineering of the humble triangle.

Friends & Founders Saw Wood Table in black
Friends & Founders SAW Wood Table

To the contrary, the Novel Chair’s lynchpin is the enigmatic arc. Essentially a capital letter H with a half-circle fashioning the back, Novel evokes the world of fashion as well as the history of art and design. Its two-tone interplay makes me see shades of Mondrian and Gerritt Rietveld’s Red Blue chair.

Friends & Founders Novel Chair in black and white one on a pedestal

Friends & Founders sculptural, collaborative approach to furniture and design is on display this year at ICFF. Look for them live at the fair or find them at Friends Founders.

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