Jenny Nordberg reinstates the value of used objects in 'The Executive' collection

With an innovative outlook and creative vision, Swedish designer Jenny Nordberg utilises pre-owned office furnishings to transform them inconspicuously into The Executive furniture collection. Swedish company Soeco, which specialises in refurbishing used furniture, lends its skilled craftsmen to the designer to shape the pieces at its Dalby-based workshop outside Lund, Sweden. The furniture design collection—which was previously on show at the Stockholm Furniture Fair 2025—comprises seating furniture, a cabinet, a wall-mounted piece, two lighting designs, a coffee table, a conference or dining table, vases and a tray.

Hailing from the southern region of Sweden, Nordberg is an industrial designer driven to explore alternatives to 'irresponsible mass production'. Her art and design studio specialises in production, limited edition designs and contextual design projects. Additionally, the practice focuses on researching production and consumerism, its history and present scenario, working towards holistic and responsible practices in the future. For The Executive collection, Nordberg repurposes a stock of obsolete furniture and object inventory from Soeco, treating them as raw materials to craft contemporary designs.

Treating the objects as a 'catalogue of parts', Nordberg disassociates them from their original purpose, viewing them with the lens of 'optimism, opportunity and flexibility' to explore all possibilities of what the end product could be. The shapes and sizes of the seating furniture are informed by the remnants of sound-absorbing partition walls made of MDF, foam and textile. Incorporating vegetable-tanned natural leather, the collection's sofa design highlights the details and natural properties of the upholstery that will age gracefully with time.

The furniture designer uses reused tabletops to create the table designs in The Executive collection, accentuating the surfaces with marks from sanding. While the coffee table is finished with paint, charcoal and lacquer, the conference or dining table features a filler and lacquer paint surface. Nordberg renews jalousie cabinets—which have been lying unsold in the company's inventory, perhaps due to their bulky form and rigid mechanism—by replacing the roll-fronts with doors made of leftover plywood. Installed with new handles and legs from old aluminium components from whiteboards and partition walls, the cabinet is finished with lacquer paint.

Scavenging through a pile of leftover materials from these upcycled designs, Nordberg creates assemblages of wall-mounted pieces from objects such as plastic sheets, black MDF boards and discarded parts of cabinet doors. Taking on the challenge of repurposing the frames of adjustable desks, the designer uses the leftover curved beams, along with pen holders and aluminium profiles from a whiteboard, to craft a lamp design for the ceiling and a table lamp. Scraps of pine plywood and aluminium profiles are shaped into decorative and functional objects such as vases and a tray, resulting in a holistic product design collection.

The furniture designs, created as a part of Soeco's latest initiative to produce refined furniture objects from items that are a hard sell, are set to identify the office of the company's CEO Mattias Andersson. Imagining a thought-provoking office space characterised by a series of distinct yet cohesive objects, the designer attempts to encourage responsible, sustainable design and thoughtful consumerism. Perhaps a design's 'newness' depends not on how polished and unused its components are but on the innovative problem-solving and fresh outlook that guides its making. With The Executive collection, Nordberg underlines that the value of objects, once created, is never lost.