The Koster Collection

A chair goes through a lot before even becoming a chair. It all starts with an idea of the chair, manifested in countless, rejected, sketches. Here, time and patience is crucial.

Eventually, the initial idea has found its true manifestation. Next phase is building prototypes and mockups. Theory needs to be turned into practice. Sadly, this is where most ideas get rejected.

The Koster chair made it though. Next step is a skilled woodworker that makes an production prototype of the chair that will test it – thoroughly. More than 50.000 repeats of monotonous static seat and backrest durability tests, followed by heavy load tests. Koster passed the tests. And a standard chair for indoor use in peoples’ homes would have been ready for production. But we intend for Koster to not only be that, but to be for professional use in hotels and restaurants as well. So that means we made it endure even further testing, to meet professional demands and standards. Also, since it’s an outdoor chair, Koster needs to deal with the elements as well. Rain, sunshine, snow, winds. Freezing winter nights and hot summer days. So we put the Koster chair on the lawn and left it there for eighteen months. This is not how people usually treat their garden furniture, but we’re not “people”. We then inspected the chair. The UV resistant rope has the exact same color, two winters and one summer later. The teak has turned beautifully silver grey. And that’s how it will keep looking for many years to come. We designed the Koster chair for design interested people to buy, and keep for a long time. And even pass them on to their children one day.

Studio Norrlandet
Jari and Anna founded Skargaarden 2007 and has since then been developing the brand. Their interest in design and furniture was the reason they started Skargaarden and later on also why they decided to start Studio Norrlandet.
Designing a beautiful outdoor piece of furniture is a challenge as you have to take into account so much more than what is designed for indoors. The challenge is what drives them to design furniture beautiful enough to place indoors, durable enough for any harch weather challenge’s.
Jari has a background as a cabinet maker trained in fine carpentry. After finished carpentry education Jari found out that finishing last and being the most thorough in class probably wasn’t the most profitable profile for future employers. Now, many years later, it is an advantage in high end outdoor furniture design. Anna interest in acrylic painting and art makes their partnership exciting and above all fun.