Broberg Riddersträle

Every year at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, an architect or designer is commissioned to create a special Design Bar. This year the honor goes to Broberg Riddersträle Design & Architecture.

Based in Stockholm, BRDA is a mixed architecture and design practice founded by Mats Broberg and Johan Riddersträle. The design duo have created a range of simple yet smart products that are often tinged with a sense of humor (Bird Table for Offecct for example).

Broberg and Riddersträle strive to inject a subtle emotional element into their designs, sometimes through the use of symbols and at other times simply through the product's functionality. To us, the cleverness of their designs nearly always inspires a feeling of "Now why didn't we think of that?"

An example of this is one of MOD's favorite new designs, speakers that recently won a Wallpaper Magazine award. BRDA moved away from the traditional black, box-shaped speaker and created a set of white ceramic speakers, using the symbol of sound as their inspiration. "It's the universal icon of noise," says Riddersträle of the truncated cone shape, which sits at the perfect angle to produce optimum sound.