Nordic design and architecture books: five worth owning

Our Nordic art and design books guide took in the whole shelf at a glance, and the Nordic artist monographs piece sat down with the painters one at a time. This one pulls a different set of books off the shelf: the design and architecture titles, the ones about chairs and rooms and buildings rather than canvases. A print on the wall and a well-made chair come from the same instinct, so if the work we sell speaks to you, these five are worth living with.

The best Scandinavian design book: Fiell's Taschen survey

Start with the map. Scandinavian Design by Charlotte and Peter Fiell (Taschen) is as close to a single-volume survey of the field as you'll find. The current edition runs to 512 pages with in-depth entries on 125 designers and design-led companies, and it's arranged by what things are made of rather than by country: furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles, jewellery, metalware and product design, 1900 to the present day. Reach for it first and the other four make more sense. On Amazon.

What's the difference between Nordic and Scandinavian design?

Mostly which countries you're counting, and it changes the reading list. Scandinavia proper is Denmark, Norway and Sweden, so Scandinavian design tends to mean the furniture, the mid-century Danish and Swedish chairs and cabinets above all. Nordic is the bigger tent, Finland and Iceland included, and it's the word you need for Alvar Aalto, for Iittala glass and for Marimekko, all Finnish. Fiell's book covers the Finns properly and still calls itself Scandinavian, which tells you how loosely both words get used once you're standing in a bookshop.

Nordic architecture books: Alvar Aalto

Then the buildings. Alvar Aalto by Richard Weston (Phaidon, 1995) is the book to own on the Finnish master, less a picture album than a proper study that sets the architecture in its landscape and shows how the same hand moved from a sanatorium to a stacking stool without ever losing the thread. On Amazon.

Danish design books: Jacobsen, Wegner and Juhl

For the Danes, three designers who worked at every scale. Room 606 by Michael Sheridan (Phaidon, 2003) tells the story of Arne Jacobsen through a single preserved hotel room in Copenhagen, the last surviving interior of his SAS House, and uses it to trace how a total designer thought, from the tower down to the cutlery. On Amazon.

Hans J. Wegner: Just One Good Chair by Christian Holmsted Olesen (Hatje Cantz, 2014) is the definitive book on the man who designed roughly 500 of them and made the world care about the joinery. The title comes from Wegner's own line, that you can't design just one good chair in a lifetime and must keep trying, which tells you everything about the discipline in the pages. On Amazon.

Close with Finn Juhl: Life, Work, World by Christian Bundegaard (Phaidon, 2019), the first full monograph on the architect and furniture designer who carried Danish Modern to America. Juhl treated a chair like a small piece of sculpture, and the book makes the case for him as the most quietly radical of the lot. On Amazon.

Fiell's chapters on glass, ceramics and textiles are only a taste of a much bigger shelf, and there's a whole instalment on it: Nordic craft books.

None of these will teach you to draw a chair. What they do is sharpen the eye for line, proportion and restraint, the same qualities that decide what looks right on a wall. If a few evenings with Aalto and Wegner leave you wanting something with that clean northern feel of your own, our illustration prints are a good place to start looking.