Álvaro Aramburu
Álvaro Aramburu makes furnishings in a quiet village in central Sweden, but he grew up amid the bustle of Madrid. His grandmother was a painter, and his school notebooks were always full of drawings and paintings. Making them, he says, “would completely transport me elsewhere.” He studied industrial design at the Technical University of Madrid, but the school’s engineering mindset felt constraining. “I started wondering if I wanted to do something on a smaller scale, something more focused on moving from material to concept rather than from concept to material.”
Then he discovered the small, craft-based, woodoriented furniture program at Gothenburg University in Sweden. He had little experience working wood but decided to go anyway. Soon after arriving, he fell in love with wood and began to free himself from the old-school engineering mindset. “I found a more personal and introspective approach to design,” he says.
