The playfulness of Blå Station

Furniture can be very personal and interconnected with other pleasures in life. This was the starting-point for designer Börge Lindau when he founded Blå Station in 1986 – a family business in a former sewing factory in Åhus on the southeast coast of Sweden, beside the ‘restless ocean’ – a sentiment he shares with his son Johan, who runs the company today.

A spirit of playfulness filled the company from the beginning, with art and jazz concerts mixing with furniture prototypes – designs that he himself would like – and a ‘flow of change’ which fits a station.

Colour is a feeling

Johan Lindau describes the design process as problem-solving, firstly in black and white. Only then is there a switch to colour, adapted to the ‘sense of the moment’. He explains, “Colour is a feeling, a mood … The basis of a palette, I believe, lies in one’s surrounding environment.” In designs like Jackson and Honken X, these yellows and blues connect well to the Vivid Vibe theme.

Pursuing new approaches to shape, function, material and process, Blå Station also seeks to respond to societal changes, through emotion, conscience and sustainability. Everything is made in Sweden.

Using powder coatings from Axalta on the metal-frame details, such as in the 100% recyclable armchair Able in primary colours, and in Veva, a table in 4,000 different heights, the designs bring a childlike curiosity into alignment with modular, adaptable, flexible thinking. The results are ‘honest’, Johan Lindau says, with an emphasis on the mobile and polyfunctional; echoing the inventive simplicity of Bauhaus at times, but with a very contemporary spirit.