flat-pack-chair-set

Forget flimsy cardboard boxes, think flat pack plywood furniture: cabinets, wardrobes, dressers, desks, chairs and tables – all able to be pulled apart anytime without removing a single screw or fastener, then fold neatly into a nearly paper-thin pile of parts.

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flat pack plywood desk

Oli Johann Asmundsson has designed a compelling collection of kitchen, office, bedroom and living room furniture around these simple core themes: ease of construction, assembly and transportation. Material savings are made in many of these products as well via perfectly-considered patterns leaving little to no extra scraps.

flat pack plywood bookcase

Plywood is a cheap material to begin with, and making flat cuts into it is hardly difficult – most of these could be created just as easily from DIY templates and made by amateurs at home. Packed flat, these pieces are highly portable and of course can be put together surface-by-surface without tools or complex instructions. A strikingly uniform aesthetic connects these various pieces despite differences in shape, size, color and purpose – a stylistic by-product of the design and manufacturing processes behind them.

flat pack furniture collection

About the designer:

“Architect and designer Óli Jóhann Ásmundsson was born in Reykjavík in 1940. He completed both his college studies and apprenticeship as a carpenter in 1961. He earned a Diploma in Architecture from the University of Nottingham in England in 1967. He worked for the first three years after graduation at the City of Reykjavík Planning Department and has worked independently since. Although he has designed a number of houses in Reykjavík, Ásmundsson is perhaps best known for his partitioning systems marketed under the Mát imprint from 1978 to 1992. In 1995 Ásmundsson started designing furniture and in 2000, his design for a multipurpose folding chair, known as the Delta Chair, was selected for the Icelandic pavilion at the Expo in Hanover, Germany, which resulted in a substantial presentation of Ásmundsson’s furniture in the respected design magazine Moebel Interior Design.”

“Ásmundsson was invited to exhibit his collapsable furniture at the Icelandic Museum of Design and Applied Arts in 2002 and in 2007 he was invited by the Reykjavík Art Museum to exhibit his work ‘Meditation on Furniture’ at Kjarvalsstaðir Art Museum in Reykjavík. His furniture design can be found in the collections of museums in four countries: Kunstindustrimuseet in Oslo, Kunstwerbe-Museum in Berlin,The Museum of Applied Arts in Vilnius and the Icelandic Museum of Design and Applied Arts.”