Final frontier - completed

There is a little room upstairs which has been less spoken of until now. Referring to the floor plan, it is the farthest one of the two small rooms planned to be a combined study and a guest room. The cupboards in this room were already painted at the same time with the rest of the cupboards and floor sanded and lacquered in the very beginning of the renovation project. However, because we have had no urgent need for this room, the old and ugly wall paper has remained in place and it has effectively served as a storage for all the tools, paints and other renovation gear.

Starting point

While we were renovating - the gear graveyard

A few weekends ago the time came, when Pekka started the final battle with the study which was the last room needing work upstairs. After dumping all the renovation junk downstairs he removed the old wallpaper and painted the walls white. Now, after moving in we have noticed an interesting phenomenon: the threshold of starting any renovation related task seems to grow greater by the day, even if the to do list is still quite long. After finally finishing whatever a task in question happens to be, we always wonder how on earth it took so little time even if the time spend procrastinating with it was so enormous.

Rip me off

Anyhow, the study is now painted, furnished and ready for use, so few lines of the end result are in place. On the left wall, we have a vintage String unit with teak finish, which was found through eBay while still living in our previous apartment. When we moved here in September, the String shelf was first placed in the living room on the wall where we now have the Vodder credenza. It fits much better, however, to the study both from functionally and visually. It is quite a large system, and thus for the study we used only part of them leaving the rest of the pieces for other rooms.

The String shelf system is very well known also outside the collector community, but it's story might not be quite as familiar for the many String owners. It was created by Nisse and Kajsa Strinning in 1949 for a competition initiated by Bonnier public libraries. The goal of the competition was to create an assembly and expandable book case. The Strinnings' design won the competition and was exhibited in the H55 exhibition in Helsingborg in 1955, then becoming a huge sales success in 1960's. The shelf system consists of veneer shelfs hung on plastic coated wire ends, and it is still in production in many different colors and materials.

String shelf system and Nesso lamp

The study room also offers a home for three different lamps. The orange Nesso lamp in the picture above was designed by an Italian designer Giancarlo Mattioli for Artemide (1967). In the photo below is the PH Kontrast lamp, which is a base model of the current snowball pendant. The PH Kontrast was originally designed by Poul Henningsen for Louis Poulsen in 1958-1962 but due to the elaborate details, it cost too much to produce so it was discontinued in 1970's.

PH Kontrast and Sunburst by George Nelson

The chair next to the table is a Bellini chair designed by Mario and Claudio Bellini for Heller USA (1998). This chair was still in development at Atelier Bellini in Milan when Pekka started working there as a designer. We actually have two of them and they belong to the so called 0-series, which is the series following the prototypes in the product development process. Therefore one can see the marks of trial and error of injection molding, which are absent in chairs in later production series.

Bellini chair and PH80 by Poul Henningsen

In the far end of the study two items remain which in the long run do not belong there at all. The first one is a very unpractical and large sliding door, which used to separate the kitchen and the living room, but was removed while renovation. It is yet to be decided whether we are going to use it or not, but until then this massive and ancient door is going to roam from room to room, wherever it happens to bother us the least. The Bubble chair by Eero Aarnio (1968) is waiting for summer, as it will be then place on the upstairs atrium terrace.

The sliding door and a Bubble chair