Leaving London: Buster + Punch Shop Opens in Stockholm

Snapshot: London-based Buster + Punch opens up it’s first non-UK store in Stockholm, Sweden, bringing their brand line of daringly virtuoso products to an international audience.

Befitting their trajectory from ordinary to extraordinary, the interiors brand Buster + Punch has recently opened their first ever non-London based store, in Stockholm, Sweden.  The London natives have come a long way from their humble beginnings in an East London garage, developing everything from lighting to furniture to limited editions like motorcycle light fittings and leather jackets, all with a craftsman’s conviction born out of a love of their art.

After a career in architecture, Massimo Buster Minale founded Buster + Punch to turn out products that combined his passions of metal, fashion, and motorbikes.  Originally, these products were custom pieces for private clients like rock stars: check out the customized mini cocktail bar, aptly titled “The Rockstar,” which looks like the inside of a guitar or violin case.  Buster eventually organized his creative output into a boutique brand line that manufactured these kinds of virtuoso interior products for the general public.

Much of Buster + Punch’s projects have been and are currently collaborative in nature, and the collaborative partners depend on the nature of the project in question, emphasizing the innovation and audacity with which the brand approaches these creative endeavors.  For Buster, excitement is in direct proportion to the daringness of the project, so he keeps things continually interesting by choosing a range of collaborative partners from different subcultures or alt-cultures as well as the mainstream.  The staff itself includes a myriad of professionals, from furniture makers to blacksmiths.  This multi-disciplinary approach to craftsmanship ultimately leaves buyers with a materialized object that has as unique a personality and history as they themselves do, which beats mass-produced interior paraphernalia any day of the week.

    Part of the methodology Buster + Punch utilize in their goal to harness the appeal of the fashion industries and channel them towards interior design, is to bridge the gap between interior items one could find in a home and the meticulously personalized items a model might wear to a photo shoot.  And so, their lighting and furniture items are fabricated with the same eye for the beautiful and mentality of the atypical.  The “Wingback Remix” is a chair upholstered in a gothically dark purple and complete with a gilded lighting fixture--for reading or, really, for anything.   The “Boneshaker 79” bike might be a 79, but Buster + Punch re-renders the exterior metallic shell into an almost militaristic application.  Lighting and furniture knobs are industrial in design, luxurious in color.  Articles like these wouldn’t be out of place on the set of a retro-science fiction or steampunk film, and in our reality, they are the manifestations of the theory that interior design is as much a locus of the aesthetically attractive as fashion and culture is.

    As the first international representative of the Buster + Punch brand the Stockholm store unites all of these design influences and philosophies.  The exterior window is embossed with a golden lettered “Live with Conviction” whose font reminisces the late nineteenth century and recalls the retro vibes much of the brand’s products exude, as does the rectangular golden borders with indented corners.  The font of the store’s name is different, modern and exquisite, yet gold all the same.  In fact, the color scheme is one of the most overtly attractive elements of the store, a carefully demarcated use of purples and golds and blacks, that is comprehensively employed in the store, the products, even the website.  The interior features displays constructed with a subtle theatricality in mind (cf. the fashionista mentality): staggered/stepped drawers, a ladder that creates the impression of elevation, and a curtain that conceals the back room.

Buster + Punch go against the grain in a modern design industry dominated by the appealing excitement of fashion, and seek to redirect an equal amount of that energy and excitement to the world of interior design, and while they’re London-based operation was a healthy step in that general direction, their now-international brand is a huge stride forward.

Photography courtesy of Buster + Punch