40—MARYLEBONE JOURNAL STYLE
From lone believer to industry leader – Shannon Denny meets Chrystina Schmidt, one of the steely Scandanavian minds behind design emporium Skandium’s unprecedented rise to success
Though many Londoners might already have had a passing appreciation of Scandinavian Modernism before 1999, getting their hands on Georg Jensen cutlery, an Arne Jacobsen chair or Marimekko fabric in those days was a different matter. That all changed one fateful day when Chrystina Schmidt and Magnus Englund laid eyes on a set of kitchen tools lying unassumingly on a shelf in a Finnish department store. The pair – who are partners in life as well as business – took inspiration from what they glimpsed, and the result is Skandium, one of the most influential design stores in the UK. It’s a chilly but dazzlingly sunny
day, and Chrystina – true to her native Finnish form – suggests we sit outside Patisserie Valerie in Marylebone High Street so we can soak up a maximum of solar energy. Thanks perhaps to their long, dark winters, Scandinavians lead the world in coffee consumption, so in keeping with this trend we order lattes while she fills me in on the Skandium story. “We went to Finland to see my
parents in summer 98, and that was when Finland celebrated 100 years of Alvar Aalto, the architect.” Everywhere they went they saw tributes to the legendary Finn’s iconic creations, ranging from stools to glassware to buildings. The experience pushed Scandinavian design to the front of their minds. “Then that summer, Iittala came out with a series of beautiful kitchen tools from international designers. It is a very old company; they have glasses from the 20s and 30s that are still in production. By accident, we saw this in a provincial department
store, nothing fancy, just on a shelf. And we just thought they were amazing. So we said, ‘This is like the Gucci of interiors – we should really bring this to London.’” The pair returned to their
adopted city and started contemplating a way to convey “the journey of Modernism” to the British public. At this time Magnus, who is Swedish, was working for the fashion designer Paul Smith while Chrystina was in demand as a photographer in the fashion industry. “Magnus was having second thoughts about fashion,” she explains. “He said, ‘You know, I don’t really want to work in fashion the way it works now, where you have to have new all the time; it’s much better to focus on quality, tradition and craftsmanship.’” This notion went into the pitch
they prepared to deliver to banks with a view to obtaining a loan. “I made a presentation with mood boards on Scandinavian design,” Chrystina remembers. “Wallpaper* had just come out with a supplement on Stockholm, so we had with us the magazine, showing it was something that was in the air and the press had picked up on it. There was no such store anywhere in the world which was a United Nations of Scandinavian design, as we called it. So we presented this to a bank. This guy was sitting behind his desk, very important in his self-righteousness. When we finished he said, ‘I don’t quite get it… What wallpaper do you want to sell?’” Chrystina laughs endlessly about
it now, but at the time it must have been crushing. “No one believed in the concept,” she says. “They didn’t even understand what we
were talking about!” Fortunately the couple met Danish investment banker Christopher Seidenfaden at a party. His mother had owned a design store in Rome in the 1960s, and his grandfather had founded the leading lighting manufacturer Louis Poulsen. “He was absolutely in awe of the concept,” she recalls. The three decided to go into business together and set out to be the best retailer of Scandinavian design in the world. The choice of location for their
venture was made with care. “The thing is, we wanted to be in central London; we did not want to go to Chelsea or Kensington or Richmond. We wanted to be an international lantern of Scandinavian design, and that meant central London.” Money was tight, so they looked to roads off and behind Oxford Street and Bond Street and, after some searching, settled on Marylebone. “Wigmore Street at the time was totally barren and empty with a few stores selling medical equipment!” she recalls incredulously. “We got the premises because no one else wanted it – it was so dilapidated. It had been empty for five years.” Transforming the rundown
location into a suitable backdrop for some of history’s most important design innovations took some doing – Chrystina describes it as a “horrendous ordeal”. “We did that shop on a shoestring,” she says. “The day before we were meant to open, the shop wasn’t ready. The floors were still wet with paint. All our crates from Finland, Sweden and Denmark were lined up Wigmore Street from the corner down to the store because we couldn’t take
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