Carl-Johan Boman

Carl-Johan Boman

Carl-Johan Boman

Carl-Johan Boman (11 November 1883 Turku - 13 May 1969 Helsinki) was a Finnish furniture manufacturer and one of Finland's first interior designers.

Carl-Johan Boman studied interior architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts in Berlin and from 1906 worked for the Boman furniture factory founded by his father, master carpenter and manufacturer Nikolai Boman (1845-1924), first as artistic director and from 1919 as managing director.

N. Bomanin Höyrypuusepäntehdas, founded in Turku in 1871, was the leading manufacturer of quality furniture in Finland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The company was a popular interior decorator for upper-class and bourgeois homes in Finland and also in Russia, especially in the 1910s.

After the death of Carl-Johan's father Nikolai Boman, his son sought to reform the factory's product range from one-off bourgeois furniture towards functionalism. In 1927, the company, known as Oy N. Boman Ab, was awarded the title of Royal Court Sponsor of Sweden. Boman's furniture won awards at international exhibitions as early as the 19th century, and even in the 1950s it participated in the Milan Triennale in 1951 and 1954 and the Scandinavian Arts and Crafts North American exhibition tour Design in Scandinavia 1954-1957.

Carl-Johan Boman's brothers also worked in the family business: Frithjof (1878-1924), Sigurd (1879-1929) and Paul Boman (1885-1952), who, like Carl-Johan, studied furniture in Berlin, and who in 1936 was appointed director of the Boman Group.