KunstenaarSwedish
Gunnar Bolin
1 actieve items
Gunnar Bolin was born in 1919 in Anderstorp, a small industrial town in Småland - the same southern Swedish region whose tradition of practical, self-reliant manufacturing has produced a disproportionate share of the country's furniture and design industry. Farm life held no appeal for Bolin, and after a series of casual jobs in his youth he made a decision that would shape his entire life: he started his own metal foundry.
On a rainy autumn evening in 1937, sitting at his desk in Anderstorp, Bolin worked out the idea for a hat rack that could be made from melted-down scrap aluminium. The concept was practical and material-conscious in a way that feels ahead of its time: aluminium can be recycled infinitely without losing quality, and the design used the minimum necessary material to do the job well. That hat rack became the Nostalgi, and it remains in continuous production today.
The Nostalgi rack is built on cast aluminium consoles that hold wooden or metal rails, with sliding hooks for flexibility. Its proportions are spare and slightly industrial, sitting in the hallway with the quiet self-assurance of an object that knows exactly what it is. Over the decades since 1937 it has been updated in materials - birch, oak, ash, chrome, various powder-coat finishes - while the underlying geometry has stayed essentially unchanged.
In the late 1950s Bolin designed the Classic shoe rack, a piece notable for its deliberately rounded metal edges at a time when sharp-edged industrial metal shelving was standard. The Dekorativ hook strip followed in the 1960s, inspired by a hook strip Bolin had noticed at his mother-in-law's house. These three products - Nostalgi, Classic, and Dekorativ - form the core of what grew into Essem Design, the company Bolin founded and that has remained headquartered in Anderstorp to this day.
The company embodies what is sometimes called the Gnosjö spirit: the culture of small-scale, local manufacturing rooted in Småland that runs from practical need rather than design theory. Bolin's approach was never conceptual. He worked from observation, function, and a reliable sense of form - the same qualities that kept Essem's products relevant for decades after they were first made.
Gunnar Bolin died in 2010. His designs are still manufactured and sold globally through Essem Design, stocked by retailers including Skandium in London and Finnish Design Shop. On Auctionist, his 27 items appear almost entirely as secondary-market examples of the Nostalgi hat rack, sold mainly through Helsingborgs Auktionskammare. Prices cluster between SEK 600 and 1,900, with the best result of SEK 1,900 achieved for an aluminium and aluminium Nostalgi in funkis condition from around 1900-talets beginning - a signal of the collector interest in early original production examples.