Studio
Appelquist Architects is a principal-led practice in Stockholm and New York. It takes on architecture, interiors and objects a few projects at a time, and the principal works on every one.
The practice was founded in New York in 2014 by Claes-Henric Appelquist. The work runs from a restaurant and bath house on the Gotland coast to a tailoring studio on Fifth Avenue and a roof deck in the Flatiron district. What holds it together is a habit of attention.
Four materials were worked out at Ihrebaden: Gotland limestone, frame-sawn pine, blackened steel and glass.
Drawing
The drawing is where the design is made. The wall section, the plan and the reflected ceiling plan are drawn as one system, so that every material meets the next on purpose, and a detail is worked until its intent is clear to those who build it. Some of the drawing is done by hand, some by writing the rule that generates it: the pattern of openings in the entrance wall at Ihrebaden was written as an algorithm, then laid up by hand in limestone from the site.
Process
Much of the work happens away from the desk. Samples are carried to the site and set down together, in the light they will live in; a plan is read against the horizon it is drawn for. The decisions that matter are made at a table, with the material in hand.
Three convictions
A frame for what happens inside. The form of a building is the second question. The first is how it gathers people, how it moves them and how it shapes the routines of the day. The hall at Ihrebaden is first a room for a long table.
The tell-the-tale detail. A building tells its story through its parts, and through the way one moves through it and touches it. The phrase is Marco Frascari's. The resin-finished pine at Ihrebaden and the steel frames and ash planks at Freemans Sporting Club are how the story is told.
Scandinavian materialism, American pragmatism. A Swedish inheritance of material and functional design, and a way of getting things built learned in New York. The aim is a body of work recognised by how it is made.
Claes-Henric Appelquist
Claes-Henric Appelquist grew up in Östermalm, in central Stockholm, in a family of film producers and directors, and came to New York at seventeen by way of a first career in front of the camera. He stayed for thirty years.
He studied architecture at Parsons School of Design, worked at Joel Sanders Architect, and took his Master of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where his thesis was advised by Nader Tehrani. From 2004 to 2011 he was at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New York, as Senior Designer and Associate Design Director for Interiors, leading teams of up to seventy on hotels, headquarters and trading floors, and was senior designer on the renovation of the Inland Steel Building in Chicago; he also contributed to the assembly hall of the NATO headquarters in Brussels. He was then at Tony Chi & Associates, and the founding principal of RAFT Architects, before founding Appelquist Architects in 2014.
In 2020 he moved the practice's centre of gravity back to Sweden. On Gotland, where his father kept a restaurant until it burned to the ground, he is building Ihrebaden, a restaurant, bath house and hotel conceived as a conversation between a father and a son, with timber from the family forest and stone from the site.
He is a registered architect in the State of New York, a member of the American Institute of Architects and of Sveriges Arkitekter (Arkitekt SAR/MSA), and a recipient of the SOM Foundation Travel Fellowship. Work on which he was senior designer at SOM received, among others, an Architect magazine R+D Award, the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award and Interior Design's Best of Year.
Services
- Architecture Houses · Hospitality · Cultural
- Interiors Residential · Hospitality · Retail · Workplace
- Master planning Landholdings · Sites within nature
- Objects Hardware · Lighting · Furniture
- Design architect With local architects of record and interior designers