10/15/2025
Few designers shaped the language of modern design like Alvar Aalto.
His work dissolved boundaries — between furniture and architecture, craft and production, warmth and precision. Nearly a century later, his ideas still resonate.
Aalto approached design as a Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art. With his wife and collaborator, Aino, they designed every element together: from architecture to furniture, lighting to textiles.
In 1935, Aino and Alvar Aalto, together with Maire Gullichsen and Nils-Gustav Hahl, founded Artek — a company built to bring their modernist ideals to life.
For Aalto, industry was never a replacement for craft, but a way to extend it — to make thoughtful design accessible, repeatable, and human in scale. Their modular approach, rooted in adaptability and intention, continues to shape how we think about design today.
It’s also a key inspiration behind why we founded In Common With — and the guiding principle of our first collection, Core: a modular system built to evolve, adapt, and endure.
We recently visited Maison Louis Carré, Aalto’s modernist home outside Paris, to photograph the Core Collection — bringing our own language of light into quiet dialogue with his architecture.
