Carl-Gustaf Hiort af Ornäs (or Nalle as he was called) was a Finnish-Swedish interior architect and furniture designer that founded his own furniture manufacturing company together with his brother in Helsinki 1945. Prior to this he had worked as a technical director at a furniture workshop in Pori and studied architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology but never graduated. Although he didn’t finish his studies, Hiort af Ornäs soon became known as an interior architect but mainly as a furniture designer. As the later, he had developed a technique to bend veneer in 3 dimensions that created versatile and ergonomic shapes, especially for chairs.
The interior shop Nupponen in Helsinki exhibited and sold Hiort af Ornäs’s furniture in Finland that were manufactured by Puunveisto, while in Sweden Gösta Westberg AB manufactured his work. Of Hiort af Ornäs designs from the mid 50’s, the TV-set bench L.205 is one of the best known. In 1957 Hiort af Ornäs participated at the Milan Triennial.
In 1971 Hiort af Ornäs designed the plastic chair Afo-Seat-2001 for the company Sokos. Afo-Seat-2001 is made of glass-fiber reinforced plastic, easily recognizable by the round hole in the back. Hiort af Ornäs retired to Spain in the 1990’s where he designed a number of houses in the Finnish-favored Los Pacos suburb of Fuengirola. He died in 1995 at the age of 84.
