Hem: Stockholm's Shortcut Between Designer and Door

Hem is a Stockholm design house, founded in 2014, that designs, manufactures and ships its own furniture rather than licensing pieces out to separate factories and retailers. Its range runs from steel-framed seating to solid-timber chairs, tables and lighting, sold direct through its own site and studios instead of through the usual multi-brand showroom.

From a Fab.com spinoff to an independent house

Hem didn't start as a studio with a founder's name on the door. In 2014 the American flash-sale retailer Fab.com, which had recently acquired the Scandinavian furniture business One Nordic, relaunched it as a new brand called Hem, with One Nordic's creative director Petrus Palmér leading the venture. Palmér told Dezeen at the time that Hem would be a "full-stack" furniture company — one house handling design, manufacturing, technology and logistics itself, rather than the usual chain of separate studio, factory and distributor. When Fab's own business unravelled soon after, Hem continued as an independent company, with Palmér still at the helm.

A full-stack model, and a Vitra connection

The full-stack claim held. In February 2016, Hem was acquired by Ormand AG, the Swiss investment firm that also owns the Swiss furniture house Vitra, and Palmér became Hem's chief executive as part of that sale, still running the house's own design, production and shipping in-house rather than folding it into Vitra's range. The business kept growing on that model: Business of Home reported Hem's profitable turnover reaching USD 15 million in 2019, more than double the previous year's USD 6 million, with a staff of roughly 50 working from an 8,000-square-foot Stockholm headquarters and a trade programme, Hem Pro, selling into more than 30 countries.

Max Lamb's decade with Hem

Hem's clearest running collaboration is with the British designer Max Lamb, whose work for the house spans three separate, very differently made pieces across a decade. In 2016 he showed the Last Stool at Milan — a splatter-patterned seat formed by spinning a single sheet of metal at high speed, each one patterned by hand, so no two come out quite alike. In 2020 came the Max Table, a three-metre dining table built from legs joined with sliding dovetails and a top held together by a hidden screw mechanism rather than visible fixings. And in 2026, Lamb returned with the Min chair, cut from solid pine: its legs are sliced at diagonal angles so a single length of timber yields two triangular legs instead of one square one, using roughly half the material a conventional square-legged chair would need for the same strength. Three pieces, three techniques, one recurring instinct — let the making method set the design, not the other way round.

The Puffy Lounge Chair, and why we're watching

Hem's other well-known seat, the Puffy Lounge Chair, is not a Lamb piece — it's by the British designer Faye Toogood, and sets a hard-lined tubular steel frame against a deliberately soft, detachable quilted upholstery in canvas or leather, the two elements left in visible contrast rather than blended into one silhouette. Objena's active catalogue currently runs through Emeco, Form & Refine and FRAMA, and Hem isn't one of them; nothing on this page claims Objena distributes, imports or is authorised to sell Hem furniture — we aren't, and won't say so until a supply agreement actually exists. If you want the same instinct for letting a frame and its material stay honestly separate, Form & Refine's Blueprint Chair and Shoemaker Chair no. 49 are on the shelf now. For our own case on why restraint is worth building a house around, see the quiet authority.

Three questions

What is Hem, and where is it based? Hem is a Stockholm design house founded in 2014, when the online retailer Fab.com relaunched its newly acquired Scandinavian furniture studio One Nordic under the Hem name, led by One Nordic's creative director Petrus Palmér. The house designs, manufactures and ships its own collection rather than licensing pieces out to separate factories and distributors — Palmér described it at launch as a "full-stack" furniture company.

Which designers has Hem worked with? Hem's collaborators include the British designer Max Lamb, who has worked with the house on three separate pieces since 2016 — the hand-spun Last Stool, the dovetail-jointed Max Table and the diagonal-legged Min chair in pine — and Faye Toogood, who designed Hem's steel-framed, quilted-upholstery Puffy Lounge Chair.

Is Hem furniture available at Objena? Not yet. Objena's catalogue currently carries active products from Emeco, Form & Refine and FRAMA; Hem is not among the houses we have a supply agreement with. We are writing about it as part of our ongoing research into houses we don't yet stock — the pipeline that runs ahead of what's on the shelf. If that changes, this article will be updated to say so plainly.