Love Arbén

Love Arbén is not only an architect, but also a professor at the university and a writer. Love is a man without freetime, fully involved in every dimension of his life, but rich in the complexities he brings together at one single point. The clarity of design in the modernist movement appeals to Love and he talks of the simplicity of expression in the designs of this period as being clean – free of decoration. Modern furniture is at its best when it becomes “invisible”. The furniture recedes into its setting, serving not controlling its space.

“I work a lot to develop the comfort of my furniture. At home I have two Barcelona chairs; they’re very nice to look at but you can’t use them. My parents bought them when I was a child and I was never allowed to sit in them. Now that I have them I realize it didn’t matter; you just can’t sit in them!”

Love Arbén is an architect, a professor at the university, a writer, a father of three and a husband with a wife who, he says, does not cook. Love is a man without free time, fully involved in every dimension of his life, but rich in the complexities he brings together at one single point.

We met Love at the Lammhults showroom in Stockholm, a space he designed that reflects his interest in building styles of the 17th and 18th centuries. The interior walls are masonry clad with stucco, much like the old churches he studied and restored as a young architect in service to the state of Sweden.

I found these old churches to be very basic in their architecture, very simple, almost modern, in a way. I work a lot with basic forms; I’m very conscious of how you lift things up from the floor, for example. I always like to build something as the Greeks did with their columns. There is something to stand on — a base — with a simple vertical element and then something happens at the point where there is a transfer to the top. All my furniture is based on these architectonic principles. I’m very influenced by the classical generation of architects, but I’m also fascinated by the modern movement.

In the modernist movement, there was a clarity of design that appealed to Love. He talks of the simplicity of expression in the designs of this period as being clean — free of decoration. Modern furniture is at its best when it becomes “invisible”. The furniture recedes into its setting, serving not controlling its space.

What I was interested in when I started with this idea of invisible furniture was something quite clean while everyone else was doing post-modern things – loud furniture and loud interiors. But I’ve always worked in a quite straightforward way.