When is an ironing board, not an ironing board?
When it's Cinderella by Anna Kraitz for Design House Stockholm.
In our (brief) introductory post to Stockholm Furniture Fair 2023 we said we didn't visit any of the myriad flagship store presentations staged during Stockholm Design Week 2023. Turns out that was wrong. Turns out we did. Turns out we visited the in-store presentation in Design House Stockholm's downtown flagship. Twice.
And where, amongst other works, we took great, extreme, delight in Cinderella by Stockholm based Anna Kraitz.
One of the indisputable motors of product and furniture design is that natural human curiosity which causes it to, enables it to, encourages it to, continually re-imagine the existing, to re-image that which exists in context of the ever new social, cultural, political, economic, ecological et al realities in which we all exist. Some objects, for example, chairs are subject to manifold regular re-interpretations, others are re-interpreted only very, very rarely.
Such as the ironing board. A beautiful example of a new product genre that arose in a very specific context, which very quickly found a universally accepted form and modality. And which has remained as it was.
But ironing didn't remain as it was.
Ironing changed.
Ironing changed because clothing materials changed; ironing changed because clothing typologies changed; ironing changed because the manners in which we approach and understand domestic chores changed; ironing changed because washing machines and tumble dryers changed; ironing changed because social pressures and cultural influences changed; ironing changed because work changed; ironing changed during Covid because nobody needed to.
But ironing only changed, it didn't vanish, and thus occasionally, just occasionally, you do need an ironing board. OK, we don't, for our part we've never owned an ironing board. Or an iron. Or an item of clothing that could conceivably have needed ironing. And even if it could have needed ironing, it would never have occurred to us to iron it.
But outside the inexplicability of our singular reality, you do occasionally still need an ironing board.
And you also occasionally need a standing height desk.
And you also occasionally need a medium height table for drinks and snacks at a party.
And you also occasionally need a sofa height table.
Why not combine them all in one object.
???
Recalling the surfboard tables of the 1960s, as perhaps most popularly embodied by the works of a Charles and Ray Eames or an Edward J Wormley, Cinderella is crafted from oak/oak veneer and via the simple modality, the exact same simple modality, of an ironing board, can be set at one of four heights, and thus stably and securely and robustly employed as an oak table/desk at one of four heights. And through the even simpler addition of an upholstered, heat-resistant, ironing board cover, is also an ironing board.......
.......by the way, do please stop us if at any point any of this stops making the most perfect sense.......
.......and should it not be needed as a table or an ironing board, or should there be no space for it to permanently set-up as a table or an ironing board, Cinderella can, as with an ironing board, be compactly folded and easily stored. Including being stored in public view as an oak/oak veneer feature, and not as an ironing board standing awkwardly in the corner of your living room. A very important consideration in context of our ever more compact contemporary urban apartments.
Or in context of the invariably compact offices of the fledgling tech start-up or the fledgling design studio. Spaces invariably occupied by youth who the majority of their time will be in no-iron leisure ware, but will occasionally have to iron some item of formal clothing: slip the ironing board cover over the office's impromptu stand-up desk, and off you go to the suffocating drudgery of the society your seeking to overthrow.
No, as an ironing board it's not particularly wide, but is perfectly wide for ironing. Or for use as a sofa/party snack table; and as a standing height desk is more than adequately wide enough, comfortably so, for working with a laptop or tablet. And thus perfect as a temporary, impromptu, home-office stand-up desk for those who only occasionally work from home, or for those who regularly work from home, have a sit-height desk/kitchen table, would like to switch from sit-to-stand on a regular basis, but don't want a sit-to-stand desk. Or as a temporary, impromptu, standing height desk in an office-office. Or as a temporary, impromptu, location in an office-office for stand-up meetings and brainstormings. Or as a temporary, impromptu, location in an office-office for a stand-up team brunch. We can already hear the cries of, "Let's meet at Cinderella at 11.55. But don't be late, you don't want to be a pumpkin!!!!!!" The hilarity, how we laughed......
Whereby temporary and impromptu are important words: as with any object designed to be freely variable in its use, there is no point in assigning it a permanent role in your life, if you're going to do that you might as well buy an ironing board; rather Cinderella must be employed with an accepted, and celebrated, flexibility and transience.
For all the easy connotations inherent within Cinderella of placing your laptop on an ironing board, of the readymade giving rise to the object, Cinderella, as best as we can currently ascertain, has her genesis in an inter-disciplinary project in which Anna Kraitz was involved concerning cleaning, and whose first manifestation was an actual ironing board presented in context of an exhibition by the feminist design platform Misschiefs. The name, we presume, we don't know, we're guessing, referring to the lowly status of cleaners in society, that status Cinderella held; but which in its Design House Stockholm manifestation is also highly indicative of its instantaneous transformability, and of its transformation of the humble ironing board into a princess of a table. The ironing board not as an ironing board but as a high-quality, responsive, engaging, contemporary, furniture object. An ironing board that become something else.
That has become something else, needed to become something else, because domestic life, office life, social life, technology, housing, materials, clothes, furniture, society, ironing, have all become something else, have all changed.
And an ironing board that didn't become something else through the benevolent agency of a fairy godmother's magic wand, but through the keen, open, unrestricted, uninhibited, vibrant questioning observation and curiosity of a designer aware of the space and time in which they exist.
Cinderella isn't available just yet, she isn't quite ready for the ball, her presentation during Stockholm Design Week 2023 was, essentially, a cheeky pre-launch teaser......... so please do get very, very excited, but do remain calm.
Further details on Anna Kraitz and her work can be found at www.kraitz.se
