Josef Frank, the Austrian-born Swedish architect and designer, never believed that a house was a machine for living. “It doesn’t matter if you mix old and new, or different styles, colors, and patterns,” he advised in 1958. “The things you like will always blend, by themselves, into a peaceful whole.”
Though not a star like Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, Frank thrilled with his furniture, lighting, and textiles for Stockholm retailer Svenskt Tenn. But it’s the fabrics (check out “Josef Frank: Patterns—Furniture—Painting” at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum opening January 28 and running through May 7) that have won him cult status. “The freer the pattern, the better,” Frank said of his high-wire creations, dense with flowers, fruits, birds, mountains, and waterways in surreal color combinations.
The designer’s printed linens are “imaginative and sometimes beautifully naive,” says Dior Joaillerie creative director Victoire de Castellane, who has dressed her Paris home in his Teheran, Brazil, and Celotocaulis. Committed futurist Marc Newson, the industrial designer, and his fashion-stylist wife, Charlotte Stockdale, are Frankians, too. “Like all good design,” Newson says, “the fabrics make me smile.”
Most, though, have been hard to get, since Svenskt Tenn, which sells them on its website, doesn’t have a showroom outside Sweden. Schumacher only recently began producing Frank’s Citrus Garden and Exotic Butterfly, which it commissioned back in 1947, and the two have proved so popular that they are being joined next month by matching wallpaper.
“Modern design can often read cold,” says Schumacher creative director Dara Caponigro. “But Frank’s textiles have a joie de vivre you don’t see anywhere else.”
Click here for a look at Frank's vibrant oeuvre.
