Thomas Sandell | Swedish Architect and Designer

Thomas Sandell (born 1959 in Jakobstad, Finland) is among the most broadly active architects and designers working in Sweden — a practitioner whose output runs from candleholders and crystal to housing developments and city planning. The through-line is formal clarity and a Nordic restraint that has held steady across more than three decades and several dozen manufacturers. His practice is sandellsandberg.

Education and early career

Sandell studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, taking his degree in 1985, and worked in Jan Henriksson’s architectural office before setting up on his own.

He founded Thomas Sandell Arkitektkontor in 1990, at the worst possible moment: the Swedish economy was entering the deepest recession since the 1930s and nobody was commissioning buildings. He began instead with small interior and furniture jobs while working part-time as a postgraduate student. That constraint shaped the practice permanently — Sandell came to architecture through objects rather than the other way round, and never separated the two afterwards.

sandellsandberg

In 1995 he co-founded sandellsandberg with Ulf Sandberg and Joakim Uebel. It was among the first Swedish offices to put architecture, design and communication under one roof, and it grew to around sixty people working at every scale from a product to a district plan.

From 2014 the office has operated purely as an architectural practice, and since 2016 it has been part of the group now known as AFRY.

Architecture and interiors

Sandell’s built work includes the interiors of Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm, completed when the two institutions moved into Rafael Moneo’s building on Skeppsholmen in 1998; the Stockholm Stock Exchange building; the restaurant Rolfs Kök; and Gåshaga Brygga, forty-one row houses on the water at Lidingö outside Stockholm.

What connects them is an unbroken attention from the plan down to the door handle. Sandell has named Alvar Aalto as the model for that — the architect who saw no distinction between designing a sanatorium and designing the chair that went into it, and who built a company to make the furniture when no one else would.

Furniture and product design

The list of manufacturers is unusually long. Artek, Svenskt Tenn, Källemo, Gärsnäs, Asplund, B&B Italia, Cappellini, Georg Jensen, Zero Interiör and IKEA of Sweden, whose PS collection of 1995 put his work into ordinary Swedish homes at a scale no gallery piece could match.

More recent work has kept the same range. The Mino armchair for Swedese is a deliberate answer to Yngve Ekström‘s Lamino, made in the same factory sixty years later. Soundwave for Offecct turned acoustic absorption into a wall panel that people would actually want to look at. There is the Torp candleholder for Skultuna, the Lina crystal collection for Reijmyre, the Cross table for Palmgrens, and the Pavo, Ella, Goma and TISTI pieces for the Finnish manufacturer Made by Choice.

Sandell designs in the same register whether the object costs two hundred kronor or two hundred thousand. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is the reason his name appears in so many catalogues at once.

Recognition

His furniture has been given the Utmärkt Svensk Form award eleven times. He has also received the Red Dot Design Award and the ROT prize three times, and has served as president of SAR, the national association of Swedish architects.

Education and early career

sandellsandberg

Architecture and interiors

Furniture and product design

Recognition

Latest design by Thomas Sandell