Svenskt Tenn unveils its 2025 holiday collection, inspired by Josef Frank

The holiday season has officially launched in Stockholm, with renowned Swedish interior design leader Svenskt Tenn revealing its Christmas collection, 'Pick your Poison'.

An intoxicating blend of maximalist accents and contemporary, refined elegance, 'Pick Your Poison' draws its inspiration from Josef Frank’s intricate 'Poisons' pattern. The design, created between 1943 and 1945, is a lush tangle of vines, hops, and tobacco – the plants behind some of nature’s most tempting, yet dangerous offerings.

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From the motif, designers Susanna Barrett and Sam Wilde have woven a narrative that celebrates both heritage and new expression, reimagining tradition through a distinctly modern lens. The collection features bold accents, shimmering glass baubles and gleaming brass ornaments – a timeless dialogue between contemporary and archival expression.

“We're delighted to step into a new century for the brand with a celebration that takes a graphic and contemporary direction”, Tora Grape, Marketing & Brand Communications Director at Svenskt Tenn, says of this year’s collection. To bridge past and present and bring this year’s seasonal vision to light, Grape invited Canadian-born designer Susanna Barrett to apply her own design language – one defined by clarity, emotion, and material sensibility – to interpret the 2025 holiday collection.

Barrett, Co-founder and Creative Director of The Studio in Stockholm, looked back to look ahead, finding inspiration from Svenskt Tenn’s early work, and from designers such as Björn Trägårdh and Nils Fougstedt. The resulting 'Pick Your Poison' collection is a nod to the cocktail parties of the 1930s and to the Bauhaus era’s clean lines, simplicity and geometric forms, with the bold colour palette taking its cue from the blues, reds and greens of Frank’s 'Poisons'. The latter are not the traditional yuletide hues, however: offset against a deep black, the red veers towards coral, and the green drifts towards variations of mint and celadon, infusing the holiday season with an elegant freshness.

At the heart of Barrett’s collection is an exploration of the theme 'Unfold', which reveals itself in geometric ornaments of hammered brass that were inspired by the simplicity of folding paper. “Our idea was to create something contemporary with roots in tradition,” Barrett explains. “Transforming paper into metal – where a simple fold turns the two-dimensional into three-dimensional. It’s a kind of unfolding that gives depth and a modern spirit.” The hammered brass is gently folded along the centre, a technique that allows the ornaments to glimmer with the light reflecting off their surfaces. Designed with versatility in mind, the circular shapes also hold glass spheres in colours drawn from 'Poisons', and can be hung from trees, doors, or windows, where they play with shadow and light, turning simplicity into sculpture.

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The concept behind Barrett’s brass ornaments and folded designs is a study in transformation and restraint, with simplicity at its core. “It’s about reduction, and then letting something emerge from the simple. It’s a kind of restraint, but also about bringing life into stillness”, she explains. The literal pinnacle in the series is Barrett’s tree topper, a streamlined, golden orb which replaces the traditional star with a minimalist gesture: a smooth symbol of modern clarity to crown the season’s opulence.

Complementing Barrett’s creations, British designer Wilde played with this year’s theme and colours to make exuberant ornaments that interpret Frank’s Poisons in both line and spirit. Wilde’s dangling creations include a brass-held cluster of green glass spheres shaped to resemble a bunch of grapes, and the “Flower” ornament, in which brass petals and red glass beads create a swaying scaffolding that suspends one singular droplet of green glass.

Alongside the new creations, the seasonal collection also brings to light a selection of pieces from Svenskt Tenn’s extensive design archive, to deliver a tangible link between the company’s past and present. Highlights include Estrid Ericson’s sculptural 'Cat Bookend' – designed in 1950 after a visit to New York’s Metropolitan Museum – Nils Fougstedt’s pewter 'Cherub Candleholder' from the mid-1920s, and Gunilla Holmberg’s hand-painted 'Happy and Grumpy' porcelain candlesticks, whose familiar forms first joined the Christmas collection in 1945. And continuing the tradition established during Svenskt Tenn’s centenary in 2024, this year's collectible pewter ornament is a trumpet-playing angel.

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2025’s most dramatic and evocative archival revelation, however, is undeniably 'The Christmas Tree', recreated by Svenskt Tenn from a 1964 capture of Estrid Ericson. In the photograph by world-renowned photographer Lennart Nilsson, Ericson is seen in her studio, arranging silver- and gold-foiled branches into a tree. This year’s creation transforms her vision into a freestanding, nickel-plated brass sculpture with shimmering beads. A firework of light-catching branches, the piece is just as suited to New Year’s festivities as it is to Christmas morning.

In this, its 101st year, Svenskt Tenn’s holiday collection becomes a reflection on time itself, showcasing heritage and reinvention, tradition and modernity, the nostalgic and the new. As Barrett says, “Our ambition was to create something that references history yet feels modern – something we’d want in our own homes today.” With Pick Your Poison, Svenskt Tenn not only achieves that, but shows that the art of decoration goes beyond the ornamental: it is a language of history, emotion, and design that continues to unfold, year after year.

Pick Your Poison, Svenskt Tenn's 2025 Holiday Collection, is available online at www.svenskttenn.com and in-store at Svenskt Tenn's iconic shop on Strandvägen 5 in Stockholm.