Our editor’s dispatch from 3 Days of Design, Copenhagen’s citywide summer fair, where endless daylight, a century of heritage and the antipodean contingent all made their case.
There’s nothing quite like 17 hours of daylight for a curious editor after a city fix. And that’s exactly what Copenhagen offered up when I visited for 3 Days of Design. It had been a while since I’d ventured further than our own design vernacular in Aotearoa, so when the fair invited me on its press tour, I took the opportunity. First up was a pre-dinner cocktail at Rue Verte, a long-standing design store, where work from Sydney’s Studio Henry Wilson greeted me at the door. Another antipodean in the room, on my first night, albeit in object form.
Summer in the Nordic region is as unpredictable as home, and Copenhagen gave us four seasons: rain day one, sun day two and by day three I’d lost track, having crossed the city on foot, by boat and by bike. Cycling is a way of life here and the quickest route between districts. Every street turns up something — from a cardamom bun to the new architecture rising around Paper Island. Anyone who has travelled with me knows the only forecast I care about is how much design I can fit into every hour.
What started as a handful of Danish brands in a Nordhavn warehouse is now in its 14th year and fills the city: this year, some 550 exhibitors from more than 37 countries, 894 events and a record 125,000 visitors from over 140 nations. With that much programmed, the first thing to make peace with is that you won’t see it all. The week rewards how you choose more than how much you cover. Splitting the city into districts gives the days a shape, north to south, or wherever the talks and openings pull you. Every design title runs a pre-emptive hit list, and once the algorithm has you, your feed fills with the same dozen names. Most are worth the visit. The rooms that stayed with me, though, were often ones I hadn’t planned for: heard about in passing or stumbled into as I wound my way around the harbour.
Across the week, I found myself looking at design in different ways. Some presentations gave product launches a clear field: a chair, a light, a material development. There’s value in that directness, especially at a fair where people come to specify, source or understand what’s heading into production. Others used Copenhagen’s apartments, churches, palaces, museums and industrial buildings to set the work in a more layered frame, with architecture, atmosphere and curation shaping the story. I was drawn to both: seeing an object on its own terms, and the shift that happens when a room influences how you read it.
Inside Marmorkirken, File Under Pop had turned the marble church into something you heard and smelled as much as saw, a site-specific installation of colour, music and scent. It was the clearest sign of a thread running throughout, with the strongest shows reaching past the eyes. Frama built a room around fragrance, and Fritz Hansen sent soundwaves into its audience during the day and at an all-hours afterparty. The theme — “Make this moment matter” — sank in the further you got into the week.
Reissue was the mood among many of the heritage brands. Royal Copenhagen put Arje Griegst’s Triton porcelain back into production, half a century after he drew these treasures of the deep. Fredericia pulled Nanna Ditzel’s Trisse stools from the archive. House of Finn Juhl coaxed new life from its namesake’s original sketchbooks. When you have a century of design to draw on, the past becomes a working resource rather than a museum piece. For brands built to last, it’s where they find their next move.
The group shows opened another register. At Fabrikken, a former factory turned studio complex, Ukurant had left the polish off on purpose: squishy hand-poured rubber tables and drywall standing raw and unplastered, emerging designers pushing materials into fresh territory.
Deoron had taken over a half-finished building site on Paper Island, bare concrete and dangling wires against starkly modern work. It was the pieces that grabbed me, domestic in scale, with a lens on lifestyle and technology. These were the rooms where it was all still being figured out, before a brand had smoothed it into a product. I’m always keen to see who’s coming through next, so the Royal Danish Academy was firmly on my list and didn’t disappoint.
The making ran between the raw and the precise. At Galleri Sonja, from Bornholm, it was all glass, ceramics and natural pigment. Out on the harbourfront at Ofelia Plads, Iittala and the aluminium producer Hydro extruded a seven-metre, walk-in pavilion from low-carbon aluminium in the shape of Alvar Aalto’s iconic vase, marking its 90th year. Reuse kept surfacing too: Mater’s Matek fabrication material, pressed from coffee shells and sawdust, and Bomma’s chandeliers rebuilt from its own crystal offcuts.
Colour, in a region not always known for it, showed up with a certain whimsy: yellow the recurring note, peppered with purples and other radiant hues, much of it purposely injected by the likes of Montana, marking the centenary of colour-loving design great Verner Panton.
You can’t come this far from home and not feel a flush of pride for the creatives who’d made the same trek.
A handful among the hundreds, and they made it count. Baina used the fair to launch a home fragrance, the queue for its aperitivo hour suggesting I wasn’t alone in my fandom. Resident showed new seating and lighting developed with designers from the Nordic region, and Sydney stylist Claire Delmar’s Latitude resonated, its collectable, coveted pieces speaking to a thoroughly modern Australian interior aesthetic. Our region’s work has a directness born of use: how a towel joins a daily ritual, how furniture earns its place in a home. Maybe it was a pull toward the familiar, but set against the calibre of everything else, they earned their place.
The shows were only part of it; some of the best moments happened in between. I spent the week with a cohort of design journalists from across Europe, and as we moved from room to room the talk was as good as the work: what was landing, what wasn’t, tips traded, the easy company of those who look at these things for a living. Connecting with the people making the experiences, and the ones taking them in, is half the reason to go.
Working in design from New Zealand, there aren’t many chances to absorb this much in one sitting, and that was the real reward of the week. The Danish event is strikingly egalitarian — free, no registration, spread across the whole city. Design here lives out in the open, on streets, in cafés, woven through how the city runs. Aotearoa doesn’t have those centuries of resonance to draw on yet. What we do have is room to build it, and a community worth putting more into: getting out from behind the keyboard to meet the work in person, to touch it, sit in it, take in its scent.
For all the distance, we’re not so far apart on our small islands. What’s being made here belongs in this conversation, and the ones who made the trip this year demonstrated as much. I came away already plotting what it would take for more of us to show up there.
Words Alice Lines
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