Toivo Raidmets is an interior architect and a renowned Estonian furniture designer, for whom design is his work, hobby and love at the same time. Toivo’s work is undoubtedly special in the context of Estonian space design and design furniture. In interior design Toivo considers playfulness important, as well as emotion and experiences. When designing furniture, the emphasis is on novelty and, in addition to the design that speaks to the customer, also on the functionality and user-friendliness of the products. Toivo Raidmets graduated from the Department of Space and Furniture Design of the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR in 1982. His relationship with the furniture industry began at the Standard Furniture Factory even before the institute and continued as the Chief Designer at the Tarmeko Design Factory in Tartu after school.
Toivo
At the end of the 1980s, having settled in Tallinn and working at the Tallinn Integrated Art Production Plant ARS, designing exhibitions became his core work duty – Space and Form, ACTA, personal and summary exhibitions of artists. In addition to designing exhibitions, he soon began participating in them – mainly with neon pipe light installations in Tallinn, Helsinki, Rauma and Vilnius. In parallel to those, Toivo Raidmets designed several well-known clubs and restaurants – Eeslitall, Flamingo, Bonnie & Clyde, Carl Friedrich. In 1992, Toivo Raidmets founded his own company TOIVO OÜ which produces furniture designed by him. Toivo Raidmets also has a long-standing career as a teacher – from 1995 to 2013, he worked as a professor and head of the Department of Interior Architecture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and is currently a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Architecture of the Tallinn University of Technology. Toivo Raidmets is a member of the Estonian Artists’ Association, the Estonian Association of Designers and the Estonian Association of Interior Architects.
