Nordic Interiors Talents Make Harborside Splash
COPENHAGEN — A group of art and design lovers toast with flutes of Champagne on the bow of an old cargo boat docked at the now-defunct Burmeister & Wain shipyard, a symbol of Denmark’s industrial heyday. Nearby, an outdoor food festival buzzes with hipsters and families, and a group of shirtless men are making their way up an outdoor rock climbing wall, demonstrating just how much the city has evolved with the times.
Indeed, adapting the design world to the times is something Natalia Sánchez, an established interior designer and founder of House of Nordic Design, a platform and incubator for the best of the region’s talent, aims to master in this next phase of her career.
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Sanchez, who has worked as an interior design and architecture consultant for private residences and commercial projects for more than a decade, took visitors at 3daysofdesign below deck, into her exhibit of 20 designers who ran the gamut from carpenters to weavers and from lighting specialist to ceramicists. This year’s exhibition was inspired by nature with the designers having approached the theme either abstractly or concretely. What’s different, she explained, is that these designers have actually mastered hand craftsmanship.
“We have a very strong tradition of using our hands, so in that sense, we encourage that a lot at the Royal Danish Academy,” Sanchez said, referring to the nation’s artisan traditions steeped in millennia of history. The Trundholm sun chariot, which dates to as early as 1,400 B.C., for example, is one such creation that shows how skilled Danish people were in the decorative arts like gilding.
Fast-forward to three millennia later and artist Pernille Snedker is making a name for herself with her marbled, almost psychedelic handcrafted surfaces. For the three-day festival, Snedker collaborated with Hans Baerholm for two design pieces: the Scrolls coffee table and console, fashioned with a Suminagashi (floating ink) appearance. “It looks like the colors are almost seeping out of the wood material,” Snedker said. “I hope to magnify and intensify the ornamentation of wood itself.”
Kibun, a project founded by designers Sofie Hannibal and Nan Na Hvass in 2020, makes handcrafted textile pieces with custom oak wall mounts by patchworking upholstery fabric, as a reflection of the world around them. The duo debuted their first furniture piece, a daybed. “A main focus of our designs is to boil down a scene into the most simplistic form and finding a graphic essence and showing that in textile pieces,” Na Hvass said.
Architect and designer Ida Linea Hildebrand, the daughter of a cabinet maker, is carrying on her family’s legacy in furniture design. After earning a master’s degree in fine arts within the field of Interior Architecture and Furniture Design, she met her future husband and cofounder of Friends & Founders, Rasmus Hildebrand, and the couple established their own studio that makes sleek, versatile furnishings, in 2013.
“We hope to create furniture designed to last a lifetime and to grow old with,” she remarked, adding that each piece is a work of art and a testament to Nordic craftsmanship.
Sara Martinsen conjured indigenous craft with her “A Tale of Grass” that took center stage on the lower deck of the barge. The Danish designer crafts her pieces by hand in order to express the inherent qualities and characteristics of natural materials like straw, wood, plant fiber, clay and stone.
“With my work I want people to experience and investigate the materials up close and activate our senses. This is relevant when good intentions must be transformed into responsible behavior,” she said.
The House of Nordic Design platform aims to create a community that will afford designers a permanent “display window” and access to a sales platform Sánchez aims to have ready by the end of this summer.
Sánchez, who has curated exhibitions for 3daysofdesign since 2014, said her aim is to make life easier for up-and-coming designers and craftsmen by creating a foundation for survival and success in the design Industry.
“We believe that Danish interior design has a unique expression and a quality which should be celebrated and shared with the world,” Sánchez said.
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