Antti Evävaara – a pioneer of quiet spaces

Antti Evävaara designed his first acoustic chair in 2002, years before acoustic furniture became popular in Europe. He has more than 40 years of experience in furniture and founded his own company in 1993.

Get to know Antti by watching 'Oman tien kulkija' -video.

Evavaara Design / Studio Antti E Oy

• Two ministries in The Hague, four years of deliveries22/09/2026
  The Dutch Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment have been acquiring acoustic furniture for their open-plan offices in The Hague since 2022.

Story

From conservator to designer

Antti's path to furniture began with restoration. He was among the first in Finland to qualify as a furniture conservator and spent six years in West Berlin restoring European furniture dating from the 17th century onwards. Those years taught him how furniture is built, how wood lives and why good craftsmanship lasts for centuries.

After returning to Finland, Antti started designing his own furniture. For him, a piece of furniture is above all a good everyday object, but at its best it is something more: an object that evokes emotions.

Read Antti's book

Published in 2016, the book Antti Evävaara – Veistokselliset huonekalut (Sculptural Furniture) tells Antti's story and the thinking behind his design. The book is in Finnish. Open the book by clicking on the cover image.

Classics

Sculptural classics

In the 1980s and 1990s, Antti designed furniture whose form grows out of its construction. In the 1987 chair, six overlapping segments recall the clinker-built hull of a boat. The drawers of the 1990 chest open with a push, so the wood grain can run uninterrupted across the entire front. Antti's classics are in the collection of Design Museum Helsinki, among others, and have furnished embassies, ministries and hotels around the world.

Acoustics

A world of silence

In the early 2000s, open-plan offices were becoming common and mobile phones were ringing everywhere, but there were hardly any quiet places to talk or concentrate. Antti saw the need and in 2002 designed an answer: the sshhh 5 chair, a quiet place of your own in the middle of an open space.

At furniture fairs the chair was unique; nothing like it had been seen before. It still is: sshhh 5 continues to surprise fair visitors and everyone who sits in it for the first time, and there is still hardly anything like it on the market. Only years later did people begin to seriously tackle noise in open spaces with booths and other acoustic solutions. By then, Antti already had years of development work behind him.

The first chair grew into a whole product family, from acoustic chairs to phone booths. Products designed by Antti have been delivered to airports in Frankfurt, Gothenburg and Helsinki, as well as to congress centers, libraries and offices around the world.

Principles

Antti's design principles

• Form arises from structure. The appearance of Antti's products stems from how they are built and how they work.
• Material first. Antti knows his materials, such as solid wood, wool fabric and glass, and how they behave.
• Made to last. Antti designs furniture for decades of use. Some of his 1980s designs are already sought after at design auctions.

Designed and manufactured in Lahti

All our products are designed and manufactured in Lahti. We deliver them from our own factory to our customers in more than 30 countries.

• Design. Antti Evävaara designs each product, and we continue to develop them based on our customers' feedback.
• Manufacturing. The parts of our products are made by partners who are all located less than 50 kilometers from our factory. Assembly and upholstery are done in our own factory. This keeps the entire production chain short and under control.
• Sales and delivery. We serve customers directly from Finland and through our local sales representatives in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Architects and interior designers can get CAD drawings of all our products.