northmodern January 2016

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Northmodern furniture and design show opened today at the Bella Center in Copenhagen and continues tomorrow, Thursday the 14th and Friday 15th January. 

Well-established Danish companies are here alongside young new designers and recently-established Danish design companies; young design talent from Belgium along with work by students and recent graduates from both the Royal Danish Academy (KADK) and Copenhagen Technical College (KTS) - shown in a large section called Schools and Talent - and there is an area for makers and crafts under the banner Handmade.

More detailed reviews and assessments to follow over the coming days.

 

Heidi Zilmer at Museumsbygningen

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At the end of November Heidi Zilmer demonstrated her work and exhibited her wallpaper at Museumsbygningen, the gallery in Kastelsvej in Copenhagen, at the now well-established and regular show for artist-craftsmen and photographers, organised by Banja Rathnov under the title The Time is Now.

 

 

Heidi will have a stand at the major design fair northmodern that opens this Wednesday, the 13th January, at the Bella Centre in Copenhagen and runs for three days.

 

looking back

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historic interiors Den Gamle By, Aarhus

 

Most Danes I meet are curious to know why I have moved to Copenhagen. And when I say I am here to write about architecture and design their response is almost always the same and almost always accompanied by a slow shake of the head. Usually they say something about Danish design being great in the 1950s and 60s but not so much now … my guess being that they are wondering how I could possibly fill my time.

Of course they are wrong. Nordic design, and that includes Danish design right now, is going from strength to strength … see the review of New Nordic Design. 

But what is also worrying is the implication that people feel that Danish design was only great over a period of little more than two decades. 

Perhaps it is simply because people now link together design and industrial production.

A major exhibition at Designmuseum Denmark in Copenhagen last year on the work of Kaare Klint did much to establish just how much the great designers after the War built on design and teaching and on developments in the furniture industry in the 1930s as production moved from the workshops of cabinetmakers to new manufacturers.

However, even this fails to recognise the contribution of furniture makers and the designers of earlier periods of Danish history … furniture was not mass produced in a factory but never-the-less it was designed and designed well and the taste and the styles and the interiors of the late 19th century, the classic architecture and interiors of the early 19th century, and even back through the 17th and 16th century and earlier to medieval art and craftsmanship in Denmark all contributed to the tastes, preferred colour palettes, forms and shapes that we now identify as the characteristics of good Danish design.

 

historic interiors from Frilandsmuseet

My feeling is that possibly the success of Danish design in the 50s and 60s has acted almost like a barrier that stops people looking further back with pride at what was produced in earlier periods. I’m not suggesting that designers should reproduce earlier furniture or historic household goods as some awful form of pastiche or look back in an uncritical way but what you do see in vernacular furniture and rural architecture is a tremendous self confidence in the use of colour, more sculptural forms, an inventiveness and necessary self sufficiency with local makers using local materials.

Maybe this could be an interesting time to look at for instance wood turning to see if it could be given a modern twist; to consider natural stains; to wonder if maybe plate racks and corner cupboards could be useful.

It's not that young Danish designers need inspiration - it's just that sometimes it's interesting, as you move forward, just to check that you haven't  left anything useful behind and It might also be fun to see Danish designers being a bit more rude.

 

Note: by being rude I don’t mean by sending me insulting emails. Rude in English in this sense means robust and healthy and crude. And no. Crude doesn’t just mean that. 

 

 

bottom cross rails are rarely used for modern tables - look at the wear on the rails here and you can see how many generations have  put their feet up as they sat around this table

Korsbæk

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As this is a long holiday weekend I’ve been doing what a lot of people do and that is watch TV. Or rather I’ve been working my way through a box set of Matador. For Danish readers no explanation is needed but for English readers it was a television series that was produced and broadcast by Danish Radio between 1978 and 1982. There is one amazing statistic that shows just how popular the series was in Denmark because when it was repeated in full, a few years after the first broadcast, the finale is said to have had an audience of 3.6 million when the total population of the country was around 5 million.

Over 24 episodes, the drama centred on life in the small fictional town of Korsbæk, somewhere just north of Copenhagen, and focused on a number of families through the period from 1929 to 1947. The main characters were Hans Christian Varnæs, who ran a family bank in the town, and his wife Maude and their children and a newcomer, Mads Skjern, who took over first a local shop and then much of the town. It is primarily about small-town life and local politics but of course set against a period of huge changes in Danish society.

Again for English readers, perhaps the best way to describe the drama is that it was set over much the same period as Dad’s Army and with the same petty snobbery that tries to keep in their proper places people in a small community where, in reality, everything and everyone’s lives, for better but often for worse, are locked together. As many of the more prosperous families still had servants there was a strong dash of Upstairs Downstairs and, being set in part around a small department store, there are elements of Are You Being Served and Open All Hours. It was not meant to be a comedy but there are deliberate elements of farce and above all a gentle and wry and ultimately affectionate look at what was then, when it was first broadcast, the Denmark of the viewers parents when they were children or a life that a great Aunt might talk about although now, of course, it is becoming less and less about reminiscence and more and more an increasingly distant historical past.

Why am I watching it? Well mainly because several people have told me that the Danish used in the script is clear and straightforward so a good way for me to pick up the rhythm and flow of the language. But I’ve become more and more hooked, in part because actually through the 'comedy of manners' the characters are interesting and curiously endearing but mainly because the sets and the interiors seem to me to be a fascinating way to look at how homes were furnished in that period … through those years immediately before and leading up to the great classic period of Danish design in the 1950s and 1960s. 

I’m curious about what Danish homes looked like before Arne Jacobsen, before Paustian, certainly before IKEA and the sets for Matador look, as far as I can judge, to be very well observed. Designers working on the different homes must have had quite a good time - not just sourcing the right furniture and props but also trying to decide how a certain character might have lived.

Of course the Varnæs home is established and inherited, so comfortable and slightly predictable, with well-made formal dining chairs, a drawing room for quite formal entertaining - basically for establishing their place in local society when the great and the good of Korsbæk came to call - relatively good framed pictures and so on. Maude Varnæs is said to have been an artist when she was young but the lack of adventure in the way the home is furnished suggest that either she was pretty timid as an artist or quickly just accepted what she and her husband inherited from his family. 

Mads Skjern, the new shop keeper, and his wife Ingeborg live above the store at first and their home becomes more cluttered but also more comfortable as they prosper but again there is little sense of style. I have not got to the episodes yet where they move out and up to a villa on the edge of town so it will be interesting to see what Mads Skjern thinks he should buy to reflect his growing status in the community.

Other characters are more interesting in their choice of homes. Elizabeth Friis, the unmarried sister of Maude Varnæs, lives initially with her sister and brother-in-law but when she moves out to her own apartment she has some comfortable contemporary furniture so pieces from the early 30s. Kristen Skjern, the brother of Mads, brought in to run a new bank to rival the bank of the Varnæs family, has some distinctly modern furniture including chairs in tubular steel.

Working-class lives are well observed. Agnes, a maid in the Varnæs house, has to leave her job and move out when she marries the railway porter Lauritz 'Red' Jensen who is active in socialist politics and their first home with just two rooms - a small sitting room and a tiny bedroom with a small kitchen and no bathroom and a shared toilet - is very like the first Sørensen apartment displayed in the Worker’s Museum in Copenhagen. There was a well-observed detail in the episode of the wedding when Agnes had to move a chest of drawers, her trousseau, from her employer’s house to the newly rented apartment. Young women, when they could, began to buy linen and other household things in anticipation of their marriage. Wages for servants were low but then at least bed and board were provided if they lived in. Various characters make comments about the way of life Agnes had become used to in an upper middle-class house and the food particularly that she had eaten. In the earlier episodes her husband to be, though protesting about what the middle classes had and did, never-the-less was quite happy to go into the Varnæs kitchen through the servant’s door to scrounge cakes and coffee from the cook because they were so much better than anything he could get at the railway station where he worked.

So what happened after 1947? And no I don’t mean what happened to the Varnæs and Skjern families. How did Danish furniture design and Danish architecture develop so quickly in the post-war period. Arne Jacobsen built the apartments at Bella Vista in the 1930s relatively close to where Korsbæk was supposed to be but there is little sign in the fictional town - or at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far - that anyone knew of that or was influenced by these very new fashions.

And it wasn’t simply post-war economics and politics that make better furniture and better design available to more people although that may have driven demand. Talking to some of the people who sell mid-century design at the antique markets and flea markets now in Copenhagen I said that in the early 60s my parents bought Danish chairs and a settee in teak and it was pointed out quite quickly that few in Denmark would have been able to afford those … they were made primarily for export to help the relatively slow recovery of the economy in Denmark immediately after the war. And in any case, if it was simply that better-paid working families simply wanted to copy the life style and interiors of middle-class families before the war then cheaper versions of more established or more ‘old-fashioned’ styles would have been more popular and there would have been little drive for new design.

Of course I don’t have any real idea of how young families furnished their brand new apartments in Bellahoj or the Dronningegård housing scheme in the early 1950s. Maybe they were less like rooms in the SAS hotel and more like the Sørensen apartment with a mixture of second-hand furniture and pieces inherited from the family.

Maybe after I finish watching Matador I need to find a TV series from the 50s and 60s that has authentic interiors to fill in the gap before I get back to watching Borgen again. I have that on DVD too … just to listen to the Danish and look at the interiors he hastens to add.

the Sørensen family apartment

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Reconstruction of the two-room apartment in Viborggade - a 'corridor' flat occupied by the Sørensen family before they moved two streets away to Gammel Kalkbrænderi Vej 

In Copenhagen at the beginning of the 20th century many working families were renting one or two rooms in overcrowded buildings that were crudely subdivided and had few or shared facilities for toilets or washing. Many of those families must have been amazed at the space and privacy they found in the new apartment buildings being constructed around the city or in social housing if they were lucky enough to be allocated a new apartment.

This process - ordinary working families moving from renting rooms to renting a complete apartment - and the improvement in living conditions of a fairly typical working-class Copenhagen family - is shown at the amazing Arbejdermuseet - the worker’s museum - in Rømersgade near Israels Plads in Copenhagen. A large section of the display shows the home and much about the life of the Sørensen family who lived in Copenhagen in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Peter Martin Sørensen was a general labourer and he and his wife Karen Marie had eight children. Through the main part of their married life they lived in a number of small apartments moving fourteen times before moving to Viborggade in Østerbro where they had a single living room which was heated by a stove and was also the only bedroom and a small kitchen with a range and a sink. These rooms opened off the common staircase so there was no separate front door and little chance of escaping if there had been a fire.

In 1915, with five of their children still living at home, the family moved two streets south to an almost-new two-room apartment at 58 Gammel Kalkbrænderi Vej which survives. It is a purpose-built apartment just below Norhavn station and just the other side of the railway to the Nordhavn Basin which had opened as an extension of the port facilities in 1904. Many of the men in the street must have worked in the docks although most would have been employed on piece rate with irregular and very insecure work.

 

58 Gammel Kalkbrænderi Vej - one of a pair of matching apartment buildings at the east end of the street. Each front door gave into a lobby with the main staircase and at each level a separate apartment on each side so in this photo it shows the four large windows of the four front living rooms of four separate apartments at each level. Behind the front room was a bedroom and a narrow kitchen both with windows out to the courtyard and from the kitchen there doors out onto the back service or second staircase. 

Peter Sørensen worked at the Fortuna distillery, first as a delivery man although he was to rise to a much more responsible and important job tasting the herbs used in mixing the snaps.  His son Kristian, then 26 years old, worked at the Free Port, and his daughters Anna (21) Yrsa (19) and Olga (17) were in domestic services while their sister Karen, a year older than Kristian, did not work but helped run the home. It must have been these regular incomes that allowed the family to rent a much better and much more secure long-term home. 

In the new apartment they had a main living room to the street and towards the courtyard a single bedroom and a narrow kitchen with a range and a sink and there was a doorway out onto the back staircase … a typical Copenhagen arrangement. When they first moved to number 58, the toilet was in the yard but at some stage an indoor toilet was constructed off the back staircase. There was a wash stand in the bedroom and when anyone wanted a bath, they would have gone to the local public bath house.

It must have been crowded for seven people but better than any place they seem to have lived before. 

Three of the children never married and continued to live with their parents and they stayed on at number 58 after Peter and Karen died. In fact the family retained the apartment until December 1989 when Yrsa Sørensen, then in her 90s,  went into residential care.

The family rarely bought new furniture and only replaced something if it was beyond repair so in 1989 the flat was barely different from its appearance in 1915 and it was at that stage that the family gave the complete contents of the apartment to the museum … an incredible and unique bequest. The museum even acquired the doorways and the floor boards which over the years had been varnished but only around the main furniture.  For some museums their displays of furniture in a ‘typical’ worker’s house has to be pieced together from lots of different collections and purchases but here is the complete contents of a genuine and a very real Copenhagen apartment.

Arbejdermuseet, Rømersgade 22, 1362 Copenhagen K

thoughts from a visit to the Sørensen's apartment

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Looking at the apartment of the Sørensen family, reconstructed in the Worker’s Museum in Copenhagen, is a fascinating view back to see of how an ordinary family lived in Copenhagen a century ago and it shows how much day to day life and household possessions have changed over a hundred years … or how little.

When the family moved there in 1915 the apartment had a practical arrangement of rooms, apart that is from not having a bathroom. There was an entrance lobby from the common staircase of the building, a square living room overlooking the street and a narrow kitchen and a bedroom both to the rear looking into the long narrow courtyard. Generally it is a similar plan of apartment that many families in Copenhagen still occupy … simply because so many apartment buildings from this period survive … including of course this one because although the contents were moved to the museum, the apartment itself is still there in Gammel Kalkbrænderi Vej.

Perhaps the main thing that was different in 1915 was the size of the family that occupied that space with five adults and, at the start, maybe even seven members of the family.

The way it was furnished is not radically different from an apartment now … although it is interesting that in the relatively small living room a fairly large dining table was very much at the centre. There was a large side board with family photographs, ornaments and candles, two corner cupboards flanking the window, a bed/day bed and a small table and two stools in the window.

 
 

In the kitchen was a sort of dresser - a double cupboard with shelves above holding crockery - and there was a small range with an additional single gas hob and cupboards across the window wall including a small sink.

The bedroom seems to have had two beds, a chest of drawers, a table and a wash stand. 

 
 

This home was certainly not about conspicuous spending and some would say, as we are beginning to be concerned about the consequences of unfettered consumption, perhaps the better for that. Some of the furniture was second hand and nothing was replaced or thrown out unless there really was no choice.

How the Sørensens lived then provides a context for our way of life today and for the design of furniture and household goods in our own homes.

If someone re furnished that apartment with things from Muuto or Gubi or Normann it would look brighter and probably less cluttered but that is mainly to do with the current aversion to pattern and the fashion to leave walls plain and painted white rather than having wallpaper. Electric lighting is now relatively cheap and, relatively, so much better and that in itself would make a huge difference. But what would a Muuto or Gubi or Normann apartment, furnished now, look like by 2115? Is the furniture from those stores designed and made to last a hundred years? Almost certainly not. Or is that an unfair question? Is it consumers themselves who do not want to pay for something that will last? I doubt that an IKEA kitchen fitted now would last a century although of course the company would argue that it is not meant to - at their prices a kitchen serves a purpose now for a family that needs a kitchen now and is only able or prepared to spend a certain amount. Simply an IKEA kitchen is not designed to last a century and no one expects it to. But the kitchen at Gammel Kalkbrænderi Vej was hardly a top-of-the-range Poggenpohl or Bulthaup of its day but after a lick of paint and with some new pots and pans it would still be pretty serviceable now. 

One obvious difference in the old kitchen at Gammel Kalkbrænderi Vej  is that there were few places to store food. Refrigeration was not available for small apartments like this until the 1960s so, at best, there would have been a vent to the outside in a cupboard in the kitchen to bring in fresh and hopefully cool air to make a larder or pantry but otherwise fresh food would have been bought daily. And actually I’m not sure that in itself is bad. Moving to Copenhagen, one of the things I like most about the city is the number of corner shops and local bakeries and small city-centre supermarkets and of course the food halls. Many families here still seem to shop on their way home from work rather than going to big out-of-town supermarkets. 

Furniture in Gammel Kalkbrænderi Vej was wood, heavy and was dark through layers of polish and varnish … and that raises an interesting question about how we got from that to the almost ubiquitous Scandinavian taste of the scrubbed clean pale-wood Nordic look. 

But what strikes me as having changed most in 100 years is not the style or the type and the form of furniture but the quality and perfect finish of new materials. We take for granted easy-to-apply paint in strong even colours; strong clear perfectly made steel or Corian or even glass for kitchen worktops and light but strong and perfectly coloured plastic for most things in the kitchen. So maybe it is the development of modern materials and not design as such that has brought the biggest changes. I can remember as a child staying in my grandparent’s house and, on waking up, being amazed by all the cracks and layers in the distemper across the ceiling of the bedroom and in the kitchen everything was glass or china or aluminium - so not a single thing in plastic and I can actually remember my grandmother buying her first Tupperware and her coming to the conclusion, fairly quickly, that for mixing cakes the hassle of washing all the parts of a new food mixer she had been given was too much like hard work and she was actually going back to a large bowl and a single wooden spoon … oh that irony of the labour generated by labour-saving kitchen equipment.

The Sørensens had just a simple radio so that is one big change … the massive proliferation of personal electronic gadgets of all kinds in the last 15 or 20 years … but apart from that there seem to be no really earth-shattering changes over a hundred years from life in Gammel Kalkbrænderi Vej in the years after 1915. So is all that design over all those intervening years just about fashion and aspirations?

Looking at the rooms in the museum they strike me as dark, almost gloomy, and initially the pictures and ornaments seem shoddy and cheap but at least they are honest and straightforward … the things the family liked and cherished … so much better than decorating a house with the ‘right’ things or fashionable things. The pictures are of coy and saccharine children and copies of old paintings of young girls in elaborate costumes in perfect landscapes and there are puppies but then I despair now when I see what is pasted to Facebook so the taste and the sentimentality have hardly changed.

Go to a flea market today in Copenhagen and you see what families like the Sørensens - and more affluent families - have discarded and OK there are PH lamps and the odd classic glass or ceramic bowl from the 1960s but there are also masses of badly made and badly designed things. I’m not condemning or criticising … because you would find much the same in any European country … but curious and interested. 

If designers looked carefully at the Sørensen's apartment perhaps the real lesson should be that then as now very few people live the design dream that is shown in the photographs in magazines and design books. Designers have to be realistic that their designs, in the majority of homes, will be seen next to last nights dirty dishes, the chair that is ugly but comfortable, the awful cups that are the wrong colour but no one can bring themselves to chuck out. Perhaps most of our homes are much more like the Sørensen’s apartment than we might realise. Surely most designers hope that their work will be used in the perfect home but the reality is that nearly every home is a compromise. It’s just that many Scandinavian homes are a more attractive compromise than many homes elsewhere in the World.

Samværket

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On now at the Anne Black Studio on Gammel Kongevej in Copenhagen, just a few doors down from their shop, is an art show or installation with the title Samværket, which I think means Together. 

This is the result of an important and imaginative collaboration between Georg Jensen Damask, the Danish textile company, and Cecilie Elisabeth Rudolph, a young fashion and textile designer, who trained at Central Saint Martins in London.

The theme of the installation is a textile for Georg Jensen Damask called Mælkebøtte that was first produced by the company in 1972 from designs by John Kristian Becker, a Danish designer and weaver who trained first at the Gerda Henning Art Hand Weavers School and then at the Danish Weaving School in Geismar. His first work for Georg Jensen Damask called Calypso was designed in 1958 and he went on to produce over 30 designs for the company. 

Mælkebøtte, or Dandelion, is a strongly geometric and stylised design formed with a tight central square or grid of lines that extend out, curve and spread apart to form a circular representation of the seed head of the plant that are spaced across the fabric in a simple, tight and regular repeat.

Georg Jensen Damask decided to re-issue the design and in 2014, to promote the table linen in three new colours, they asked people to return original tablecloths to the company to exchange for the new version but on the condition that they also provided the company with the story of how and when and why they or their family had originally bought that table linen. Well over 200 responded.

With such a strong response, they then came up with the idea of an installation to reuse these old tablecloths in an interesting way and chose the theme Together for togetherness. Mette Tonnesen, Marketing Manager at Georg Jensen Damask explained that their “ambition was to create a universe in a fun and informal way that retells stories from the Danish home.”

In the world created by Cecilie Rudolph, with a room set for an elaborate meal, the damask, in strong colours of deep blue, a salmon colour and deep yellow, has been reused for wall covering, upholstery, and flooring … in fact to cover nearly every surface including all the plates and cutlery of the table settings and even over an elaborate candle sconce on one wall … to create an incredibly bold and striking effect. 

Lengths of fabric have been cut with laser lettering repeating some of the histories and other stories are also on display. There have been other events at the exhibition to involve visitors and reinforce the theme of entertaining.

 
 

In some ways this installation is reminiscent of a project at 2nd Cycle in Helsinki for Artek. To mark the anniversary of the iconic Stool 60 … a design by Alvar Aalto that has been made by the company since the 1930s … 2nd Cycle took back stools that had been purchased over the years but again asked for personal family stories that explained why the stool had been important to them or why it had been repainted or who had covered the stool with fabric.

Both projects have identified that strong loyalty that customers can feel to both a company and a product but it also shows new customers that, when they invest in a well-made design, a design or product can become a cherished and important part of their own life story and possibly over a considerable period of their life.

Of course fine tablecloths from Georg Jensen reflect the important role of entertaining in Danish life and with it the tradition of setting a large table for a gathering of family and friends with good linen, china, glassware and cutlery.

 
 

Samværket continues at Anne Black Studio, Gammel Kongevej 103, Copenhagen until 16 October

Heidi Zilmer at Louis Poulsen

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Louis Poulsen invited Malermester (master painter) Heidi Zilmer to provide wallpapers and art pieces for the new room settings in a major remodelling of their lighting showroom on Gammel Strand in Copenhagen.

A number of hand-painted papers are shown in the entrance area, including a new dragonfly design, floral designs, geometric patterns and designs with silhouettes of bowler hats and one design has silhouettes of classic pieces from Danish design history.

Wallpapers by Heidi Zilmer from her Nordic range, based on historic knitting patterns, have been used with Nordic Antique in a kitchen area and New Nordic for a bathroom setting. In one  setting - for the new Patera pendant from Louis Poulsen, designed by Øivind Slaatto - there is a panel of the bowler hat design in white on silver along with a Jacobsen two-seat Swan Sofa in white leather. Very elegant, very subtle and very sophisticated.

There are smaller works by Heidi, many gilded, including silhouettes of famous lamps from Louis Poulsen and several larger panels with geometric designs have been used as decoration, hung in with a large group of paintings along with a mirror, across one wall of a bedroom setting.

 

 

Nordic Antique wallpaper in the kitchen with an AJ Royal pendant above the work top and the Louis Poulsen PH Snowball over the table

 

New Nordic from Heidi Zilmer in the bathroom setting of the recently remodelled show room

Decorative panel above the desk and a silhouette of a classic PH pendant from Louis Poulsen by Heidi with a PH 4/3 Table in the bedroom setting in the show room

Den Danske Keramikfabrik 2

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PHOTOGRAPH PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF TINA MARIE BENTSEN, DEN DANSKE KERAMIKFABRIK

 

Keen to find out more about Den Danske Keramikfabrik, I had coffee yesterday at the Design Museum with Alikka Garder Petersen and Tine Broksø, two of the ceramicists behind the new factory, and with Susanne Meyer who is working on their publicity.

The idea for the factory actually evolved from meetings of a ceramic club in Copenhagen. Many ceramicists work alone or share studios with one or two other artists and may take interns but contact and support from other professionals is important. In their studios, it is obvious that production has to be geared up to the kiln and the number of potters or ceramicists working there so, for very simple practical reasons, it can be difficult to respond if there is, for instance a large order for tableware or an idea to work on something that is much more ambitious or possibly more demanding technically.

Den Danske Keramikfabrik will provide those facilities and open up commercial possibilities for not just the initial group of 16 ceramicists but also other studios and other artists around the region … so already there has been a meeting in Malmö to involve studios and ceramicists in southern Sweden and the idea is to attract work from further afield including north Germany.

Bornholm is well placed geographically with ferries from Ystad and the flights from Copenhagen airport taking around 30 minutes. This was seen to be crucial if artists are to work closely with the production team in the factory. 

The factory site in Nexø was first seen in May 2014 and it is planned to open in the New Year so progress is fast. There will be an administrative board of five with three ceramicists and two business members.

From the start there has been a focus on conservation and sustainability, aware of their use of water, the need to recycle heat from the kilns and to use renewable energy where possible.

A factory mark has been designed for pieces produced by the factory and it is hoped that work will include that mark to identify the pieces as made in Denmark and made by hand although of course some artists and some design companies may opt to use just their own mark.

An initial range of pieces called Upside Down will be produced for an exhibition on Danish Design Now that opens at the Design Museum on the 13th November. That range will showcase what the factory can provide in terms of techniques, skills and expertise and will be produced as a limited and numbered collection for sale with 100 copies of each piece.

Den Danske Keramikfabrik

 

PHOTOGRAPH PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF TINA MARIE BENTSEN, DEN DANSKE KERAMIKFABRIK

Ola Giertz - Månadens Formgivare - designer of the month - at Form Design Center

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Thread Bench and Monte Carlo

 

Ola Giertz graduated from Carl Malmsten Furniture Studies in 2010 … the design school is a department of Linköping University but is based in Stockholm as part of the Department of Management and Engineering at the Institute of Technology.

In 2011 he established his design studio in Helsingborg. 

The exhibition includes a question and answer session which is published on the web site for Form and gives some interesting clues to motivation and inspiration for the designs shown here. A ‘favourite designer’ is Verner Panton and a declared mission is to “always keep the child in me and be playful” which would explain the strong shapes and use of strong colours in some of the pieces. 

Also in the exhibition are his candle holders Haus and Industrial Shine, the award winning Frame seating units and the House hanging rail system.

 

Bordus, Rocking Chair and  O-table

 

Armadillo

 

The exhibition continues at Form Design Center in Malmö until 30th September

Ola Giertz

Cabinetmakers' Autumn Exhibition - part 2

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Today there was a second visit to the Cabinetmakers’ Autumn Exhibition at the museum at Øregaard in Hellerup. In part this was because I wanted to double-check some of the information that was in the first post because the Stack Chair in the exhibition was not the piece of furniture that appeared in the catalogue and the Wedge Chair and Stool were not actually in the published catalogue … my fault for not writing down the information on the labels properly on the first visit although it was hardly an onerous task to go back but a really good opportunity to look again at the furniture.

I have to confess that actually I started the visit with a coffee in the museum cafe and that itself was also fortunate as chatting to the people working there I was directed up to the space above the cafe where there was a terrific exhibition of work from a school who had visited the museum during the week. These were year 4 pupils so I think that means they were about 10 years old and inspired by the furniture they had seen, they had designed their own furniture and made models that were still on display.

With this second visit to Øregaard, some extra photographs have been added to my catalogue of images.

 

Stavl - Stack, Henrik Ingemann Nielsen de Place Furniture by Lars de Place Bjørn

Wedge Chain + Wedge Stool, Foersom & Hiort-Lorenzen, HIKI Snedkeriet på Hans Knudsens Instituttet

 

With this second visit to Øregaard, some extra photographs have been added to my catalogue of images.

This second post is also an opportunity to include more photographs of the interior of the house - specifically the elegant staircase which shows exactly why Øregaard has been such an appropriate venue for the exhibition.

northmodern ... wood

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walnut table top from Noyer

 

Noyer

Noyer made by hand, with Janus Larsen and Nikolaj Hviid, are a very new company and this was their first time at northmodern but they create furniture with real confidence and with a very strong distinct style, cutting the thick walnut of their table tops with angles and sharp chamfers and then supporting the weight on thin, angled, inverted tripods that give the pieces quite some drama. 

Along with the table, the collection includes substantial walnut chopping boards and bread boards with knives and the same American walnut is used for the arms of a wall light and a floor-standing lamp.

It was impossible to take the right photographs of the main conference table to do it justice, given the lighting and the number of people that were looking at the display, so I have arranged to go out to their workshops north of the city to talk to them about their work and, hopefully, to take some better photographs to post here.

Noyer made by hand

 

InaCircle

The FrejaChair by Henrik Frederiksen, in Danish ash with a soaped finish, has thirteen parts that fit together without fixtures or screws and it is the weight of the person sitting on the round plywood seat that pushes the structure together. 

FrejaChair from InaCircle and in its the packaging for shipping

 

Self-assembly means shipping and delivery is easier and cheaper but then packaging becomes an important part of the total design and of course instructions for assembly. There is a clever and attractive animated video that shows the sequence for putting together the chair.

 

 

On their stand at northmodern, the chair was also used to create a striking display which, I guess, in an art gallery would be described as a multiple.

 

InaCircle

 

Manufakture

The work table and pin boards from Manufakture were shown at northmodern alongside wire chairs from Overgaard & Dyrman.

Christoffer Jørgensen formed Manufakture in 2011 and has workshops in Copenhagen.

The table is available in ash, mahogany, oak or Oregon pine and the same woods are used for the frames of his range of linen-covered pin boards.

Manufakture

 

linen-covered boxes for papers and documents from Manufakture

 

Nordic Appeal and Foto Factory

Maria-Louisa Rosendahl and Martin Bray were at northmodern again with their range of stands and holders for iPads and Apple computers and screens. These are all beautifully made in plywood and are very cleverly designed to set the screen up at the right height or to set the keyboard or the laptop at the optimum angle.

There is a version for a lap top so that you can latch the support over wooden knobs fixed into the wall to create a small work station, they call a standing desk, and a variation is about to be launched for your tablet computer which should be about the best way there is to keep it up off the work surface and away from food if you are one of the growing number of people who keep and use recipes digitally.

 

 

They were at northmodern to promote their other company Foto Factory with beautiful photographs of landscapes and sea and harbour views. Their first prints came from trips to Scotland and around England … Denmark has most things you could ever want except mountains … but back here in Denmark Martin is creating an amazing portfolio of photographs of the coastal scenery and woodlands and forests and the estuaries, creeks and harbours of the very beautiful natural scenery here.

Nordic Appeal  

Foto Factory

northmodern

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Today was the first day of northmodern, the design fair at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. The first of three days and I’m feeling a bit punch drunk already. Just so much to see and so much to take in and to think about.

The exhibition space is arranged through three large halls with several additional spaces including two entrance areas, a VIP area, and outside terraces for when you feel you need fresh air and, of course, places for food and coffee. Within each of the large halls there are areas left open with seating supplied by some of the exhibitors and display areas run in different directions so nowhere has that awful feel of so many trade fairs with long long endless aisle.

At the Bella Center it also helps that there are areas of top lighting in the central hall so, particularly at this time of year, good natural lighting that changes as the sun moves round so again adding interest with pools of light changing across the displays.

I spent the day walking around, talking to some designers but generally trying to absorb what was there and where it is so tomorrow can be more focused.

MUUTO

Major brands like Muuto have large display areas and are taking this opportunity to introduce new items to their catalogues. Woud, a very new company have developed in an incredible way since northmodern in January. January they were good but this is a very impressive step change up which is really good to see … development and confidence when some are still cautiously talking about if or not the economic recession is over.

WOUD

I was impressed by the new company Reform who are hacking … their word not mine … IKEA kitchen modules with one design of their own and three other new kitchen 'makeovers' designed for them by Bjarke Ingels, Norm and Henning Larsen Architects. No messing about here … there is an English phrase … if you don’t ask you don’t get … Reform asked and got. I tried to take photos but breakfast had just been spread out over the four kitchen island units and people swarmed in.

reform - at breakfast and after breakfast

 

There are also a good number of keen new designers and new companies here and I will profile several of them on the design review over the next few months … including a new local company SIXTEN::ERFURT and I have arranged to see them in their workshops on Amager to talk to them about their furniture so I can write a post on this site in the profile series.

Relatively new design companies like Overgaard & Dyrman and Mette Duedahl are here to build on and consolidate their growing reputations.

 

Finally for now, as it's late in the evening, as at northmodern in January, several young designers from outside Denmark are here providing a different viewpoint or perhaps a different starting point as they come from slightly different design traditions. I was impressed by the group of young Belgian designers and in particular Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte and will try to write up a little of our wide-ranging discussion for a post because he certainly has a different viewpoint on design … in part because his design for a ladder chair takes your view point up 3 metres from the ground.

Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte

restoration of wall paintings at Moltkes Palæ

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At the end of last week Heidi Zilmer invited me to see her work on the restoration of wall paintings in the Gamle Seglsal - an antechamber to the Store Sal or first-floor great hall in Moltkes Palæ. The palace is now owned by Haandværkerforeningen, the association of craftsmen, and the room was decorated for them shortly after they bought the building in 1930.

Set on the corner of Bredgade and Dronningens Tværgade in Copenhagen, Moltkes Palæ dates back to the late 17th century when the first house on the site was built for Jørgen Henriksen Gosebruch, a Chief Customs and Excise Officer.

In 1696 the house and gardens were bought by Frederik Gyldenløve, half brother of the king and Governor-general of Norway. He rebuilt and extended the house and it remained a major town palace for a sequence of wealthy and aristocratic families through the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1852 the palace was purchased by Count Moltke, Prime Minister of Denmark, and his name is still used to identify the house.

In 1930 the property was bought by Haandværkerforeningen and they commissioned the architect Gotfred Tvede to alter the main entrance from Dronningens Tværgade and the main staircase, both on the south side of the palace, and to construct a new north range containing a new first-floor great hall for events and major dinners of the association and at the same time Tvede remodelled the courtyard side of the earlier street range to create this lobby or antechamber to the new hall.

Decoration in the room is painted directly onto the plaster and with time areas have been damaged or the paint has lifted slightly - hence the need for a programme of restoration works.

Heidi Zilmer is a very skilled restorer of historic hand-painted wallpaper as well as being a talented and prolific designer of new wallpapers. Here, in the Gamle Seglsal, the first stage was to consolidate loose paint and then fill and prepare areas of more extensive damage. After restoring the base colour, Heidi marked out the missing areas of the design … surviving areas of the pattern, to be reproduced over the damaged sections, were traced in pencil onto thin paper and then, the outline was pricked through with a line of closely spaced pin holes and graphite powder used to transfer the design to the wall - a technique known as pouncing. Original details of the artists brush strokes for line work and pronounced strong brush strokes in areas of blocked-in colour have been imitated exactly and pigment has been carefully and precisely matched to the surviving colours where they have faded or changed in different ways.

 

 

That evening I went out for supper with Heidi and her assistant to discuss their work.

As I have said elsewhere, I first met Heidi last Autumn at Museumsbyggningen when she showed her wallpaper designs and demonstrated historic painting techniques such as trompé l’oeil and imitating wood graining in an exhibition called The Time is Now. And I talked to Heidi again at Northmodern in January and saw her at the 3daysofdesign event called Re-framing Danish Design where her wallpaper was chosen by Danish™ for their exhibition.

As well as restoring historic wallpaper and historic decorative schemes in major buildings, I knew that Heidi also teaches design history and has designed an extensive range of modern wallpapers. I just assumed that she had studied at university in Kolding or here in Copenhagen.

It was only as we talked that I realised that in fact she had followed a traditional craft route and had completed a full painter’s apprenticeship. She is proud, justifiably proud, of that because it is those tangible skills that inspire all her designs and those skills and knowledge of her craft that has brought her international recognition - she was invited to participate in the annual meetings of the Salon of Decorative Painters exhibiting her work first at the Salon in Bergamo in 2009, in Versailles in 2010, in Tokyo and then this year at the Salon in Lecce.