lifeiscarbon®

Above Magazine Reloaded

You might remember us writing about the launch of Above Magazine from Sweden last month. Well, their second issue has just gone up online and it’s full of their usual mix of high quality street fashion shots from Malmö.

Kalle Peterson from Above Magazine got in touch to let us know about the new issue and hinted at some exciting plans for next year. We plan to interview Kalle in January and when we do, we’ll let you know what they’ve got planned.

In the meantime, regardless of whether you understand Swedish, it’s still worth taking a look at their latest issue. Especially if you’re curious to see some of the latest street styles from Sweden, profiles of top fashion blogs and a list of must-have fashion tips.

Take a look at some photos from their latest issue below:

Normann Pop Up

Our friend Piers at PSFK has long been following the Pop Up store phenomenom in New York and London, and it seems that the trend has now spread to Scandinavia. lifeiscarbon® recently discovered a pop up store for Normann Copenhagen in Oslo. It’s clearly a temporary venture with no signage and products simply displayed on piles of boxes. Given how good Normann’s designs are and the difficulty of finding them in other stores in Oslo, who cares about the layout of the store.

The pop store is located at Saltomortale at Solli Plass in Oslo and, from what we can gather, if the experiment is a success there might well be plans for a more permanent store. We’ll be keeping our fingers crossed.

In the meantime, here’s a selection of our favorite products from the current Normann Copenhagen range:

Bicycle Bonus

We love this recent post at Treehugger, not just because we're into bicycles but also because we're fans of the Swedish retail chain Ikea.

This year Ikea has given each of its 9,000 UK employees a brand new folding bike to encourage sustainable mobility to and from work. The bestpoke bikes are made by Raleigh especially for the Ikea's Christmas gift. Staff were also given a 15% subsidy on public transport to encourage integration of transporation (the bikes fold-up to squeeze onto Britain's overcrowded trains and buses!).

The gift sends out a strong message about Ikea's commitment to sustainable development. It is the store's second high-profile green gesture this year following its decision to introduce a charge for plastic bags and encourage reusable ones. Plastic bag take-up at checkouts is down by 97 per cent.

Danish Minimalism On Wheels

Apart from our fixation with certain colors, you may have noticed that we also have a soft spot for bicycles. In addition to the stripped down Alta bike and the highly practical TrioBike, we’re also in love with the Selandia bike from Sögreni of Denmark.

Established in 1981 by Søren Gregers Nielsen, Sögreni have built a reputation for their unique and simplistic designs and their attention to acheiving both functionality and durability. Nielsen’s designs have long been admired for their artistic elements and have often been displayed in museums, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

New Scandinavian Architecture

As you know, we love black and we love white, but occasionally lifeiscarbon® falls for other colors too. As it happens, we've recently fallen in love with red, and it has nothing to do with the festive season that is upon us. We might simply be tired of our cold grey winter surroundings, but perhaps it's due to our latest architectural discovery.

If you’ve ever visited any of the Scandinavian countries you will have noticed that many older houses and barns are painted in bright colors like red or yellow. The tradition began because these were often the only paint colors that could be made with materials found locally and buying white paint was simply too expensive for most people.

These days most Scandinavians wouldn’t dream of painting their houses in bright colors and prefer exteriors of untreated material such as wood or concrete. However, in the past there were another reasons for painting houses in bright colors. Given the predominant weather in Scandinavia and the intense colorless sunlight, there’s certainly nothing welcoming about cold grey concrete buildings sat in a barren snowy landscape. Buildings painted in strong colors are not only psychologically warmer but also have a greater chance of getting heated by scarce winter sunlight.

Winter Equipment: Best Designs

The weather in Scandinavia is getting noticeably colder and we’re beginning to look forward to soon hitting the mountains. lifeiscarbon® is lucky enough to own a mountain hide-away on the edge of the Jotunheimen mountains in Norway. It’s a back-to-basics sort of place heated by log stoves, without electricity apart from solar powar and with the only water coming from melted snow. The cabin also happens to be located 22km from the nearest road and, since it’s snow bound from the end of October until early June, getting there involves a 2-3 hour ski trip.

Our thoughts have naturally turned to getting fully equipped for our up and coming ski trips and we’ve been taking a look at some of the best winter equipment from Scandinavia. Here’s a selection of our current favorites

Naked Nordic Ambition

In Finnish, Muutos means ‘changed or fresh perspective’ and the word has inspired the name of an exciting new Scandinavian design company. Together with the best young Nordic designers, the visionary design company Muuto wants to once again make Scandinavia the world’s leading region for design.

”We believe that the road to success for modern Scandinavian design lies in a strong belief in the best younger designers. We give the designers the freedom and inspiration to create new designs, and we see it as one of Muutos’ primary goals to be on the forefront in the development of the designers”.

carbonarts™: Knotan Exclusive

One our favorite Scandinavian photographers of the moment is Knotan. Originally hailing from Örnsköldsvik in the north of Sweden, these days Knotan lives and works in Stockholm. Born in 1973 and originally trained as a welder, he quickly grew to dislike a series of dreary jobs and ended up taking the decision to attend photography school.

If his photo style begins to look familiar to you (see images below), it's probably because you recognize his earthy approach from publicity shots for T-Post. From the early days of the company, Knotan has been responsible for the distinctive photography on their website.

Scandinavian Eclectic

Magazines We Love: Part 4

Jan Walaker, founder and editor of Hotrod magazine, certainly made life difficult for himself when he named his magazine. Try Googling his magazine and you’ll end up with pages and pages of results about hot rods, street rods and muscle cars. Take a look at the magazine and you won’t find a car in sight.

The name is not the only interesting peculiarity of this Norwegian based English language magazine. Every issue is a completely different concept from any that have gone before. It’s always a pleasant surprise when picking up a new issue to discover radically different content, lay out styles and even different paper stock (paper grade is selected to suit the images in each issue). Jan even likes to play with the masthead. The latest issue has the masthead in reverse and the one before had an almost invisible varnished title. Whilst Jan is always the editor and Bjorn Kusoffsky is always the joint art director, each issue is produced in collaboration with guest contributors. All of which makes for an intriguing read and ensures that Hotrod remains one of our favorite magazines.

Classic Swedish Toys

Since our posting about Playsam has generated so much interest, we’ve started feeling guilty about not mentioning the other Swedish toymaker, Brio. To set things straight we took a trip down memory lane to remind ourselves of the Brio range.

All Scandinavian children grow up with Brio toys. Starting with Pull-alongs, moving on to educational toys and ending up with the wooden railway set. Although, crafty parents have realized that Brio’s trains and wagons fit on to the much cheaper Ikea railway tracks……but we didn’t tell you that.

It’s almost impossible to pick our favorite toys from the Brio range. We love them all and so many of them have become design classics. Here are just a few of their better known pieces, most of which bring back many happy memories:

Monochrome For Scandinavian Kids

By now you’re sick of us telling you that we love black. But we do and we just can’t help it.. So imagine our disappointment over the years when we've trying to track down some stylish monochrome outfits for our kids. Easy to do at the excellent Comme Ca Du Mode stores whenever we’re in Tokyo but it's never been easy to do in Scandinavia. That is, until Greg from Daddytypes introduced us to Tuss.

Tuss, based in Stockholm, makes children’s clothing in minimalist designs and colors; black, grey, white and beige (ok…they also happen to make a shocking orange for special occasions). The label was founded by the designer Catti Aman and bills itself as “the ultimate simple solution”. Indeed, everything about Tuss is very simple from the clothes to the website and even their wonderful store in Stockholm.

Take a look below at some of our favorite items from their current range.....

Swedish Cool: Crochet Style

Professional free skiers Kaj Zackrisson and Sverre Liliequist have competed in big mountain and skier cross at a world class level for many years. They are also well known for appearing in some great ski films from Free Radicals, IMAX and Swedish Posse. When off the slopes, they satisfy their adrenaline thirst with other pursuits such as surfing, motor cross, skateboarding and crochet! Yes, that's right, Kaj and Sverre like to crochet and it's the story behind the creation of their successful clothing brand, Kask.

Armor Plated Swedes

There’s still no snow in Scandinavia and very little chance of a white Christmas. Perhaps to compensate for our lack of skiing, lifeiscarbon® has been out looking at some of the latest designs in ski gear.

Clearly the new trend in Scandinavian skiwear is to combine high tech synthetics with old world tradition. And black is definitely the new black. There was a time, not so long a go, when each Scandinavian country tended to favor wearing ski gear that matched the color of their national flag. Having then been through an opposing trend that favored the brightest colors possible (DayGlo lime, fluorescent orange and bright butterscotch for example) it seems that black is now the color for the ski slopes. And there’s nothing better to match your black hi-tech jackets and salopettes than traditional Scandinavian knitwear. Except that these days, traditional mittens and bobble hats are all bearing large and colorful logos of modern brands like Bavac, Kjus, Peak Performance, Ulvang etc and the companies that produced the originals have disappeared.

We’ll write about a few of our favorite brands in some future posts (we warn you now that you’re going to get very tired of seeing black, black and more black) but let's start by introducing you to the Swedish brand Poc.

New Design Heaven

Last night lifeiscarbon® went to the launch party of Holedesign’s superb new interior design store in Oslo. We felt like we’d died and gone to design heaven. Oslo finally has a interior design store that lives up to its promise and deserves to have a place on the global design map. Having said that we had better very quickly point out that there are of course other good design stores in Oslo (see a list of our favorites below) but none of them can match the scale and the style of this new venture.

The new store is based in a converted industrial warehouse. We particularly love the way that they haven’t been tempted to over do the conversion but instead have left original features wherever possible. There are patches of old floor tiles, graffited steel warehouse doors and raw concrete stairways. Whenever they’ve needed to put in a new doorway they’ve literally blasted a hole through the wall and left it untouched apart from adding sheets of sliding glass. It’s a huge space spread over three levels and all that’s missing at the moment is a café or restaurant (we're sure that there are plans in the pipeline).

Scandinavia In The Blogosphere

lifeiscarbon® are clearly not the only website writing about Scandinavian aesthetics but just recently it seems as if the whole blogosphere is talking about new Scandinavian design and innovation. So that we can concentrate on writing about our particular favorites rather than attempting to catch up with every piece of news, here are some links to recent interesting articles from our friends at Core 77 and design*sponge.