Furniture From Scandinavia Gallery

Furniture From Scandinavia Gallery at 1668 Wisconsin Avenue NW is a Scandinavian furniture showroom in the upper Georgetown commercial corridor, adjacent to the Addison/Ripley Fine Art gallery and the Frameworks framing studio in the gallery block. The Scandinavian furniture gallery serves the Georgetown residential market with the Danish and Swedish design tradition that has been among the most influential in the international furniture market since the mid-twentieth century modernist movement established the Scandinavian aesthetic as a global standard.

Scandinavian furniture design as it developed in Denmark and Sweden in the 1940s through the 1960s produced the most enduring body of furniture in the twentieth-century design canon. The chairs of Hans Wegner, whose Wishbone Chair, Y Chair, and Shell Chair are among the most studied furniture designs in the history of the form; the furniture of Finn Juhl, whose organic and sculptural approach anticipated the biomorphic forms that American designers would develop in the same period; and the modernist furniture of Arne Jacobsen, whose Egg Chair and Swan Chair for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen remain in continuous production, are the reference points that the Scandinavian furniture gallery presents to its Georgetown customers.

The Wisconsin Avenue location at 1668 is in the upper commercial block that has developed a concentration of art galleries, antique dealers, and design studios that serves the Georgetown community’s cultural and residential shopping needs. The furniture gallery at this address occupies the specific position between the antique dealer and the design showroom that is appropriate to the Scandinavian furniture tradition’s status as both historically significant and contemporary.

Hours run Tuesday through Saturday. The Scandinavian furniture tradition’s relevance to the Georgetown market is partly a matter of design history and partly a matter of practical quality. The Danish and Swedish furniture makers of the mid-twentieth century century developed their craft in the specific context of the Scandinavian material tradition: the local hardwoods, the craft tradition of the rural furniture workshop, and the design education that the Copenhagen and Stockholm schools provided. The result was a furniture tradition in which the material was always respected and the craft was always present.

The Georgetown collector of Scandinavian furniture is typically acquiring the original vintage pieces from the Danish and Swedish makers of the postwar period, or the contemporary versions that the descendants and licensees of those makers continue to produce. The Furniture From Scandinavia Gallery at 1668 Wisconsin presents the Georgetown customer with the option to acquire authentic Scandinavian furniture, in the period or contemporary versions, from a dealer with the expertise that the specialist requires. Hours run Tuesday through Saturday. The Wisconsin Avenue gallery block at 1668 provides the Furniture From Scandinavia customer with the combined gallery, antique, and design context in which the Scandinavian furniture tradition belongs: the serious domestic object in the company of serious art and antiques, in the Georgetown neighborhood that has historically valued all three together. Hours run Tuesday through Saturday.