The Copenhagen home of American designer Cassandra Bradfield, where nearly everything was made by her Studio or someone she knows.

Enter Cassandra Bradfield’s apartment and one of the first things you notice is the sculptural pendant slung low over the dining table, an undulating form drawn for Soho House Stockholm and now lighting a home rather than a members’ club. It’s a design by Asca, the studio Cassandra co-founded with Sofia Olsson. A cat named Mousse is tiptoeing across the banquette below. Almost everything else in view is the studio’s, or the work of a maker she can name: a home composed piece by piece.

“Visually warm, with a layer of softness and a bit of history injected,” is how she describes her aesthetic. “It’s about respecting where a place comes from.”
Here, that place is a 19th-century paper factory, carved into apartments long ago. A factory-yellow she’d noticed in old Danish industrial buildings turns up on a window frame, an echo of what the rooms once were. She reads a room texturally before anything else, and much of what she’s done here works on you before you clock it: paint rolled and brushed so the colour moves as you pass, the floorboards sanded back and given a single coat of oil. “What I’m always chasing is that this-was-always-here feeling,” she says. “That magical in-between.” Getting a fresh piece to sit as though it had been in the room for years is the harder trick, and the one she most enjoys getting right.

What the studio didn’t make, she chose with the same eye. The table and the banquette beside it are finds from friends; the Cadre dining chairs were designed by Cassandra and Sofia for New Zealand’s Resident. They followed her home from 3 Days of Design, where Asca and Resident shared a showroom, the studio staging Room for Resonance and the brand showing the chairs among its new collection. Coffee tables and lounge chairs from that presentation landed in the living room at the same time.

Together they tipped a palette previously dominated by honey tones, matched to the buttery walls, towards blues and greens. The apartment shifts with her work and is never quite finished, which seems to be the point. Half-built prototypes rotate through the space, ideas she works up and lives alongside until deciding whether they hold. She’s slowly clearing them out, although the habit of testing a piece by living with it is baked into the process now.

Comfort without compromising on creativity is the ethos. She wants a chair you can sink into for the length of a dinner, without it looking soft, a clean architectural line holding a genuinely easy seat. “I’ve sat on a lot of hard flat surfaces in my lifetime, so I wanted to prove you can have both,” says Cassandra. “It can be comfortable without being comfortable looking. That doesn’t quite make sense, but you know what I mean.” The Cadre is her most pared-back take on that, and what she’s looking forward to now is seeing how other designers set it into rooms of their own.

Cassandra belongs to a generation setting Copenhagen’s pace, designers raised on the mid-century Danish canon the city is known for and pushing well past it, pulling international references and whole projects in alongside the local grain. Asca, the studio she and Sofia run, takes on the full arc of a space, the interiors and the objects inside them, across homes, hospitality, retail and exhibitions. The pair met at Danish brand Frama, and it was only once they’d each struck out alone that the absence registered.
“I realised after I wasn’t working with her that I just wasn’t having as much fun any more,” says Cassandra. Sofia is in Verbier now, up in the Swiss Alps, so day to day they’re mostly on the phone, the two more alike than not and each happy to disappear into the fiddly corners the other leaves alone.

They’re part of a loose collective of independents, the kind of scene where people hang each other’s work at home and turn out for each other’s openings. Her own studio sits on the other side of town in a shared yard of workshops, carpenters, metalworkers and glassblowers a few doors down. “Everyone is so supportive,” she says.
Out of a more austere school of design, Cassandra and Sofia have been letting softer layers back in, their own femininity and a little decorative whimsy, over a practice that begins with something a person can feel and grasp all at once.
Ómós is that outward reach at full stretch, a 40-seat restaurant and 16-bedroom guesthouse in Abbeyleix, in Ireland’s County Laois. It belongs to chef Cúán Greene, who trained at Noma and Geranium, and now  cooks close to the Irish land, all foraging and fermentation and season. Asca shaped its interiors, a space built to shift from morning to evening, working alongside designer Rebecca Norberg of Denmark’s Relief Gallery. “When ego is left aside, you get a stronger project,” says Cassandra, who loves the long, end-to-end jobs for the company they keep.
She arrived at all of this from Maryland, by way of architecture school in North Carolina, and left the States with little thought of return, unmoved by New York or Los Angeles and out of step with the design culture at home. Buying a place of her own in Copenhagen did what no rental had. “Building a home is an enormous part of not having that expat one foot in, one foot out thing,” she says. Denmark rewards the effort.
The place can appear like a frictionless international city, everyone switching to English the moment you land, and that surface hides how particular it is underneath, a society built brick by brick from what people put in, its schooling and taxes and expectations all deeply set. “I would never call myself Danish,” she says, as fact more than complaint. What that buys her is a version of daily life she hadn’t known was on offer: a city visibly cared for, a level of social trust that lets her think differently about where her taxes land, a freedom she still marvels at. “I’ve never felt safer as a woman anywhere in the world,” she says, heading home on her bike late at night with headphones on and music up full blast.
Her spare time in the city goes to exercise, book club and a long-running Dungeons and Dragons campaign, six-hour sessions for which she’ll turn the lights green. “It’s essentially people doing improv for hours, and you have to be very silly to do it,” she says. All those hours, she reckons, keep a muscle limber that most adults let seize up. It’s the same conviction that runs through the work: play, taken seriously.
She’s still building the place bit by bit, and catches herself wondering which of these pieces will stay for good. A home like this only happens on purpose, arranged and rearranged over years by someone who designs what she most wants to live with and knows precisely who to call for the rest.
ascastudio.com

Interview Alice Lines
Photography Biddi Rowley

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• A contemporary home with a stainless steel kitchen and an arched coffee corner