DesignerSwedish
Nils Strinning
2 active items
In 1949, Bonnier - the Stockholm publishing house - ran a competition asking designers to solve a simple problem: how should books be stored in a modern home? Nils "Nisse" Strinning, studying architecture at KTH in Stockholm, entered together with his wife Kajsa. Their answer was a pair of powder-coated wire ladder frames and three shelves that could be fixed directly to a wall. Of 194 entries from around the world, theirs won. The design went into production the following year and has barely changed since.
Strinning was born in Kramfors in 1917 and trained as an architect at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, completing his studies in 1947. He and Kajsa had already begun experimenting with bent steel wire before the Bonnier competition, debuting with a wire plate rack. That material - light, adaptable, easy to ship flat - became the basis of everything they would go on to build together.
After the String shelf won the competition, international recognition followed. In 1954 the design received a gold medal at the Milan Triennale. The following year it was shown at the H55 Helsingborg Exhibition, one of the defining shows of postwar Scandinavian design. By 1952 Strinning had founded String Design AB to manage production and licensing, and he fought a series of patent battles against copyists before winning a decisive ruling in the Swedish Supreme Court in 1961. Production continued until 1974, when it was briefly halted, before being revived in 2005.
Beyond the String shelf, Strinning designed furniture for manufacturers including Casala and Thonet, and he and Kajsa ran an architectural practice - first in Stockholm, then from 1959 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where they collaborated with European manufacturers. The String Plex variant, a free-standing shelving unit, was also developed during this period. He passed away in 2006; Kajsa in 2017. Their shelf was acquired by the Swedish Nationalmuseum's design collection in 1979 and received the Long Life Design Award in Japan in 2020.
At auction, Strinning items appear primarily as vintage String shelving systems from the mid-twentieth century, handled most often by Bukowskis Stockholm and Stockholms Auktionsverk. The 34 items tracked on Auctionist are predominantly categorized under Storage and Cabinets, Furniture, and Shelves and Bookcases. Realized prices on the Swedish secondary market have ranged from a few hundred to around 8,100 SEK for a complete multi-section String system, reflecting steady collector demand for original production pieces.