3Daysofdesign: The full round up

Denmark's Official Design Festival and Copenhagen's Design Week, 3daysofdesign is known for bestowing upon us the cutting-edge of the interior world’s most northern realms, along with a global perspective.

Scattered across showrooms, studios, galleries, rooftops and other indoor and outdoor venues within the city’s design districts, 400 Scandinavian and international exhibitors imaginatively showcased their upcoming collections and directions. The event saw the contemporary and the classic intermingling, with long-established names rubbing shoulders with emerging designers and brands of tomorrow, all bound by a feeling of creativity and community.

This year considered storytelling took precedence over clickbait as exceptional products and inventive ways of thinking converged across furniture, lighting and home accessories. So take a look through a Nordic lens at how our homes will start to evolve over the coming months…

The chocolate addiction is going strong around the world, with rich brown shades spanning the Dairy Milk to the Bournville spotted all over the freshest furniture in Copenhagen. The colour can’t help but feel alluring and like it’s some kind of indulgent ‘ooh-I-shouldn’t-but-I-will’ treat, creating a sense of drama and decadence – while simultaneously seeming warm, grounding and intimate thanks to its link to nature.

If you stepped into the Fritz Hansen exhibition and took a seat, chances are you would have found yourself being comfortably cradled by the cocoa. Its PK22 lounge chair by Poul Kjærholm looked like a slab of Willy Wonka’s finest in tactile brown leather, while the shapely curves of Arne Jacobsen’s Series 7 chairs looked like delicious Lindt bunnies in coordinating bouclé.

At the Muuto showcase, the Folded trolley by Johan Van Hengel summoned memories of snapping off a neat chunk of chocolate and revelling in a moment of indulgence. The powder coated bent steel offset the intense colour, with cocoa’s warmth and velvetiness contrasting the material’s sharp bends and angles. Coming in various sizes and uses, the design mirrors the confectionery not only in tone – one piece is also never enough.

Cane-Line’s new palette got mouths watering with more than a hint of praline in its palette, with indoor and outdoor sofas, chairs, tables and cushions covered in the deep, moreish hue. The tactile lava stone and aluminium Glaze coffee table carried it particularly well, the high-shine finish lending the piece the feel of a dessert freshly coated in glossy ganache.

The introduction of a trio of Danish lamps with papery, triangular folded shades looked similar enough to be, if not siblings, then friendly cousins – a clear, this-can’t-be-a- coincidence indicator of the direction lighting design will be taking. The shapes are chic yet relaxed, avoiding anything overly considered while embodying the refinement and ease of the Scandinavian interior.

The shade of &Tradition’s Bella Chandelier by Space Copenhagen is divided into round- cornered quarters, referencing a four-leaf clover. The light’s large individual curved canvas columns foster a sense of weightlessness, lending it a calm, steady aura, while the leaf-like whimsicality makes you envisage it growing in the wilds of a fjord or a summer house garden

The Admiral Portable Lamp by Pernille Arlien-Søborg for Audo has a sculpted fabric shade that forms a neat five-petalled flower. Combining formality with flair, the light’s textured minimal-yet-decorative linen shade emphasises the shadow each inward swoop creates, offsetting the compact base and giving it a characterful twist.

With a billowing outline, Gubi’s Hornbæk Portable Lamp has a design language drawn from the ships and shoreline of Denmark’s northern coastline. Made up of a pair of flowing folds, the sand-coloured canvas shades take its form from sails catching the wind, filled with movement and fluidity. A hand-glazed ceramic base acts as an anchor, bringing weight and stability to the almost-airborne textile.

Futuristic furniture akin to that from the 1960s space age rocketed into 3daysofdesign this year, making the event even more ahead of the times than usual. The home is morphing into a star deck, and the effect is something that hovers in the future but carries a comforting feel of the nostalgic. One thing’s for sure – high shine chrome is back, and so are low profiles as well as smooth and rounded, is-that-a-UFO-or-my- lounge-chair forms, as we look beyond our planet and turn to the wonders and mysteries of the universe.

Take home an entire solar system with Brokis’s Planets Mini by Vrtiška & Žák. A compact take on the brand’s Planets light means that low ceilings or reduced floor space aren’t a barrier to creating your own glowing stellar system. Its elegant counterweights and pulleys mean it’s simple to adjust the glass LED pendants and keep them on ever-changing orbits.

Ready for blast off? If you were leaving straight from the festival, Carl Hansen had you covered – take a seat in its Scimitar Chair by Fabricius & Kastholm and you’ll be inspired to explore infinity, and beyond. Known for its striking curved stainless-steel base, it was first created in 1963 and is a bona fide product of the space race, coming directly from a time when the design world – and world as a whole – took on an avant- garde, let’s-go-to-the-moon silvery glint.

We all know and love &Tradition’s Flowerpot VP1 light by Verner Panton, and the rainbow of colours it comes in. A special version debuted in Copenhagen for what would have been the designer’s 100th birthday – the pewter edition. Its deep silvery colouring comes from tumbled and polished stainless steel which is then left raw, which on its rounded shape makes for an unmistakeable 1-2-3-lift-off vibe.

The coolest green du jour? The fresh, standing on the Nordic coast with wind whipping you in the face shade of seafoam. It brings characterful vitality and energy into a room in a way that’s both refreshing and tranquil, immediately waking up the mind with its playful brightness that’s a step up from a pastel while still soothing and connecting to nature.

House of Finn Juhl’s limited edition collaboration with fashion brand Sea New York saw its Japan sofas, lounge chair and footstool dressed in a zingy seafoam tone (complete with tiny embroidered florals). The colour gave the modernist, 1950s-designed pieces a light-hearted personality, for a skipping-along-the-seafront-skimming-stones mood, which cast an intriguing tension against the dark walnut frame.

The heavy set Rely chair by Hee Welling for &Tradition carries the pale colour with delight, its generous proportions lifted by the colour’s airy quality and its soft aqua vitality. The yellow within this shade gives the green a bright disposition, as if it’s floated under the sun all day or almost dissolved into the sand, so the seat seems full of breezy, buoyant energy.

Finally, one of the few standout sofas to take centre stage at the festival. The Coltre is a brand-new seating solution from Muuto, featuring wave after wave of cushioned curves. Sharing its name with the Italian word for blanket, it offers a warm and inviting embrace to all who use it. Designed quite literally to anchor people in place, Coltre combines a “too comfortable to leave” softness with a form that encourages conversation, creating a place where hours can slip by like minutes

PH 1/1 Chandelier Centenary Edition, 1933, Louis Poulsen - Happy 100th anniversary to Poul Henningsen’s legendary PH lighting system! As a present, Louis Poulsen gifted the world with the limited-edition PH 1/1 Chandelier Centenary Edition, which originally entered homes around the same time as electricity. Now crafted in aged brass with fine hairlines inspired by early originals, it features trios of small shades in mouth-blown dusty terracotta coloured opal glass.

Vipp455 and 454+ Swivel Chairs, Vipp - The new office chair design for the ages has arrived – may we present the Vipp455 and 454+ Swivel Chairs. Tall, tapered, slimline and seamless on an elegant four or five- legged 360-degree rotating base, the chairs have enlarged extra comfortable seats with extra padding and come in a range of curated leather or textile (or bespoke) upholsteries. Need more movement? The 454+ version has an adjustable seat height and a tilt function.