spotlight on finnish designer jouko kärkkäinen and his wall panels

We spotted this up and coming Finnish designer Jouko Kärkkäinen in 2002 when he was bringing out his first product – at the time was called Swell wooden panels, but nowadays they are just called plywood elements. These panels and beautiful and delicate and used quite often as pieces of art. I think we were actually the first people ever to order a set of these panels from him, and ours were all hand-made, individually dyed and signed.

The current production seems to have white and birch-colour panels, so we were lucky to get ours hand-dyed by the designer in a varying shades of darker brown (see the last photo). What is also special about our panels is that every panel has a different contour, whereas the current production seems to offer 2 designs. My picture really doesn’t do justice so I’ll try to dig up a picture where the panels are attached together and hung on the wall. Sadly our panels are still in a storage in Finland, as I have been worried (and it’s not cheap either) to send these delicate things on such a long journey to the other side of the world.

images Jouko Kärkkäinen

Our Swell panels – some of the very first ones ever and these were hand-dyed. We also have 6 different custom-contours from flat to very wavy, whereas the current production seems to have two different ones only. Lucky us I say!