Carrie- 07.09.07
Design House Stockholm produced Marie-Louise Gustaffsson’s Carrie, which comes in a bike model and a shopping basket model and hit store shelves around April apparently, but i finally encountered it in person today… and couldn’t resist, and bought a white shopping basket (not being a biker). I’ve long admired Gustaffsson’s work, her slacker chair (remember the bean bag office chair?) as well as her Table of Trash (images of both below incase you’ve forgotten). I also have great respect for the quality and simple beauty of products from Design House Stockholm, and how much they embrace young designers.
The Carrie basket has been written about greatly ~ but getting hands on with the baskets themselves (and having one on my desk as i write this) ~ made it worthy of a post. I found the green bike basket and white shopping basket over at Zinc Details, which unfortunately is slow to update their online store. More thoughts (read: gushing about the bike model i didn’t buy) and images below.
These are the Slacker Chair and Table of Trash. Don’t they both look ridiculously satisfying?
Here is the shopping basket in black… (both the shopping basket, which has less reinforcement and no bike mounting/hanging plate, and the bike basket are available in white, black, and green)
One detail i wish i had images of to show you are the bike mount ~it looks like one side of a bookend, that mounts to your bike, so that you can hook the basket on and have it sit on the part parallel to t he ground. Its really nicely done, and i love that you then 1. don’t have to worry about someone stealing your awesome basket and 2. it really IS perfect to pack a picnic, bike over, and then carry it with the shoulder strap (that is on both models). They slip into these holes:
According to Scandinavian Details, which has the shopping basket in black and white:
“Marie-Louise made her first prototype for the bicycle basket out of crochet tablecloths in her studio for an exibition called “Tokyo Style” in Stockholm in 2004. The theme was “fika” (Swedish word for coffee break) meets Japanes “tea time”. For Marie-Louise the best kind fo fika is a picnic in the countryside. Since she prefers to travel by bicycle, it was natural for her to find a way to carry her fika on her bike. She chose an ornate material because it reminds her of her grandmother, who always baked seven different types of cookies for fika and served them on her finest crochet tablecloths. The basket is therefore both functional and emotional and if you turn the basket upside down you get a table that looks like it is covered with a sweet crochet tablecloth. Educated at the Royal College of Art in London, Marie-Louise has a MA Degree in product design.”
Close up of the bike basket in green…
This is a great bicycle basket. I gifted a green one to my mom and now she uses it for her trips to the library. I purchased hers from http://www.decorativethings.com/bicycle-basket.html after calling around to a couple bike shops without success.
----- Carl 06.10.09 09:32