By Jonna Dagliden Hunt and Tom Cehlin
Hands-on design
FRENCH DESIGNER PAUL Vaugoyeau has always had a thing for Scandinavian design. In 2008 he studied for a year in Finland, and from then on he was hooked. “It was very different from how we studied at home,” he says. “It was so much more practical. We were in the workshop making things. I wanted to continue on that trajectory, I had no clue what Stockholm was like but at the time it felt like the right place to start a career.”
Vaugoyeau now lives in Midsommarkransen – a former working-class area of Stockholm that has become populated by young urban creatives – with his wife and fellow designer Anne Vaugoyeau. After viewing lots of different places, they found a little bit of Paris in a 19th-century apartment with beautiful light. “This one was one of few that had large windows in a row – a little bit more Parisian than Stockholm apartments,” says Vaugoyeau. “It has really nice natural light. We opened up the apartment to let the light flood through the space.” Here, every piece has a sense of meaning and place. “It’s special to have a connection with things in the home that you have made,” says Anne Vaugoyeau. “Not having too much stuff, but things that matter to us is important. Things we’ve made or picked up from travels. Drinking coffee from a cup we bought in a small Japanese shop makes every ritual feel so much more special.”
When arriving to Sweden in 2010, Paul Vaugoyeau joined architecture and design studio TAF in Stockholm as an intern, and he soon started to define his own style as a designer. He began to focus on the details of furniture design, in contrast to the industrial design he had studied in France. “To me Scandinavian design is about finding the essence, by reducing and designing with less resources and materials,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be minimal – to me essential is a better word than minimalism. At the same time I often have the word human in mind when I design – it can be something functional as well as appealing to the eye and body.”
Vaugoyeau quickly made a name for himself on the Stockholm design scene. From TAF he joined acclaimed studio Form Us With Love, and in 2014 he began working on a pro
