Flat out Fabulous creations for your home

Taking their design cue from the Scandinavians, a young Cape company is producing collapsible furniture, write Craig Jacobs

With homes getting smaller, space has become one of our scarcest commodities - and so it's not surprising that the décor world is increasingly looking for innovative ways to solve this.

Over the past few years, a growing number of creatives have been turning to flat-pack designs as a convenient and stylish solution.

In Cape Town, Pedersen + Lennard, a young design company which is rapidly gaining a global following for their clean yet clever creations, are turning to flat-pack as a means to not only offer affordable furnishings, but designs that can be easily shipped to any corner of the globe.

"Although, like other designers, we do make once-off bespoke pieces, the flat-pack idea is to create a range of pieces that are actually quite reasonably priced, thereby making it accessible to a wider audience," explains James Lennard who, along with varsity buddy Luke Pedersen, started their design practice a couple of years ago.

There are items such as the Ingvar dining table in birch, which disassembles down to five components (and a few support structures) and which retails from R5200 depending on size; and the assemble-it-yourself Tree coat stand which costs R2200.

"Everything we will be doing from now on will be flat-packed," says Lennard, who explains that the move has made it so much more economical for them to ship their pieces because they take up so much less space.

Pedersen traces his family back to Scandinavia, so it's not surprising that they've drawn inspiration from the Swedish company synonymous with assemble-it-yourself decor, Ikea. They named their flat-pack range "Ingvar" after Ikea's founder, Ingvar Kamprad.

Lennard says the idea came after they were commissioned at the beginning of last year to create the furnishings for the units and restaurant connected to the American-style caravans that serve as lodgings at the Old Mac Daddy trailer park hotel in Elgin, outside Cape Town.

"We were doing the tables in sturdy plywood, and as they developed, we figured we could tone them down and make them flat-packed so they would be easier to transport," he says.

Ingvar has piqued interest overseas, with leading design blogs such as Trend Hunter and Design Milk both running features on it.

Pedersen + Lennard first came to prominence for their bucket seats, which have cropped up in the coolest of places, from Braamfontein's sparkling Hotel Lamunu to decor stores in Milan.

They display their wares at another of their ventures, a coffee shop-cum-office called The Field Office in Barrack Street.