As a kid, Swedish product designer and builder Love Hultén[1] obsessed over circuits. “I used to tear electronic toys apart, trying to understand their insides,” he says. Hultén attended the local design school in his native Gothenburg and, while there, discovered his true calling in the woodshop. The cases he crafted were a perfect complement to the creative electronic projects he’d been experimenting with since his youth. Hultén went on to a career making expressive and tactile synthesizers[2], retro-inspired game consoles, and other truly funky audiovisual contraptions that combine the organic and the electronic.
Erika Svensson
Studio Space
Hultén’s studio is located in a Gothenburg community called Konstepidemin[3]. The buildings were originally constructed to house the sick and dying during mid-1800s cholera epidemics. “My studio is in the basement where the nurses used to do laundry, I think,” Hultén says. “Could be worse, I guess. I have a sculptor friend who’s in the old crematorium.”
Erika Svensson
Family Ties
The hulking green band saw and table saw in Hultén’s workshop were passed down from his father, a cabinetmaker. These daily drivers are old and heavy, so he keeps them on wheels. “Mobility is mandatory in a small workshop like mine,” Hultén says. “I keep almost everything on wheels … I mean everything.”
Erika Svensson
Tool Array
Hultén keeps his white tool cabinet meticulously organized, a necessity in his small space. “It gets messy real quick,” he says. “I’m not a big fan of hunting down screw bits lost in the haystack.” While Hultén has many hand tools, he says his L squares are indispensable. His old cutting machines...