Monica Förster is one of Scandinavia’s most influential designers. Despite a wide range of styles, her distinct design voice is always recognizable – whether in carpets, glass, cutlery, hand-carved bowls, or furniture for Europe’s leading manufacturers. A five-time Designer of the Year in Sweden, Förster is represented in the permanent collection of the National Museum in Stockholm, with exhibitions at MoMA, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In collaboration with Fogia, she has created Kern, an expressive coffee- and side table series made from a new marble-based material composed of upcycled waste. A new material as the starting point - Kern is as much a sculpture as it is a table. Both your eyes and hands are drawn to it. Its slightly uneven surface is brushed, not polished, to highlight the natural qualities of the material. “This is a completely new material made from marble waste. It has a fascinating appearance,” says Förster. “We began with the material, which led us to a brutalist form that we softened by breaking off the corners—done by hand, so each table is unique.”

Kern is the first product made of Outt, a marble-based material created to utilize waste from quarries in Northern Italy. This innovative process reuses not just marble chips (often used in terrazzo), but also marble dust as a binder. T he result is an upcycled material with a high marble content—around 85%—and a character all its own.

Read more about the tables here.