Asplund Floor & Books

Rooms carry memory. The Old Library at the Nationalmuseum opened in 1919 — its interior crafted in panelled oak, designed to gather knowledge and make it accessible to everyone. In 1984, the library moved out. The room remained for over thirty years, until the Nationalmuseum reopened after a comprehensive renovation in 2018 — and I was commissioned to design the old library´s new interior.

I spent time simply being in the space. I sketched what I saw and felt: the newly laid oak parquet underfoot, the rows of books in the old shelves, the three arches and the three large windows that fill the room with light. From those sketches, Biblioteket emerged — a hand-knotted carpet that reads the room from the bottom up. Materials were chosen with the same care: wool and TENCEL®, a botanical fibre extracted from eucalyptus, produced in a closed-loop system with significantly lower water consumption than conventional alternatives.

Floor & Books grows from the same place. New patterns, drawn from the same sketches, with the original colours preserved. Not a repetition but a continuation — the same conversation, carried forward. Hand-knotted in Tibetan knot technique, in the same materials as the original.

I believe that the things we live with should connect us to something real. A room, a material, a moment of craft. These carpets do that. They are produced by Asplund, founded in Stockholm in 1990 — a company that has always understood that good design is something you live with for a long time.