A limited edition of 500 numbered pieces, each one bearing Karl Malmvall’s signature.
This September, we let an everyday object, shaped into sculpture, meet Yves Klein’s iconic color. Step Stepladder, in Klein Blue – a small, deliberate echo of a man who once tried to sign the sky.
In 1960, after a decade of chasing it, Yves Klein found his blue in a single moment – the exact mix that gave International Klein Blue its depth. Karl Malmvall found his ladder the same way – not sketched, not planned, but spotted, in a brief second.
Every home needs a stepladder to reach the top shelf or hang a picture – and every home hides that something in the back of a closet. Malmvall’s moment of clarity was simple: a ladder that doesn’t hide. Hung on the wall like a piece of art, or standing on the floor as a sculpture – waiting, present, rather than stored.
That’s the real mechanics of a good idea – in design, in art, in music. It never actually arrives out of nowhere; it just looks that way. Years of experience and quiet know-how gather unnoticed, until they suddenly resolve into that same second of clarity.
“Step is more than just function. It has to be so beautiful that you want to hang it on the wall, instead of hiding it away in a closet”
– Karl Malmvall
The Step Stepladder first launched in 2007. Since then, it has been named Winner of the Wallpaper Design Award and the ELLE Decoration Swedish Design Award (Furniture of the Year, 2011), and was selected as a Wired Editors’ Pick in 2013.
Images and content courtesy of Design House Stockholm.
Karl Malmvall
It was certainly no accident that Karl Malmvall became a furniture designer. He more or less grew up in Karl Andersson & Sons’ furniture factory in Huskvarna, a firm started by his grandfather and for which his own father designed furniture. After studying at the Carl Malmsten school in Stockholm and the Aarhus architectural college in Denmark, Karl was discovered by Gillis Lundgren who was one of Ingvar Kamprad’s closest collaborators. This resulted in two decades of working at IKEA, initially at the furniture giant’s design office in Switzerland and thereafter in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The years that he spent at IKEA stimulated an interest in the practical details of design that few designers devote much attention to: creating a product that not only works well but that is also well adapted to manufacture and distribution.
Over the years Karl has acquired a notable collection of such items and it was the prototype of a folding chair that he presented when he first met with Design House Stockholm’s founder and managing director Anders Färdig.
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