5 Copenhagen-Based Creatives Pushing the Boundaries of Danish Design
Few aesthetics have achieved the level of global recognition that Scandinavian design has. Known for clean lines, minimalist forms, muted colors, and premium craftsmanship, the work coming out of Nordic countries (specifically Denmark) is among the most iconic in the industry. “Danish design is a union of ethics and aesthetics,” says Christian Andresen, the creative-experience director at design house Fritz Hansen. “One of its virtues is that it transcended the country. So many companies became internationally known based on the designs from the ’50s and ’60s.”
With names like Fritz Hansen, Georg Jensen, and Carl Hansen & Søn still producing in-demand classics and cutting-edge architecture firms such as Henning Larsen and Bjarke Ingels’s BIG working on a global scale, the Danish influence stretches far, its appeal rooted in simplicity, connection to nature, and a human-focused approach.
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But there’s a fresh group of practitioners in Copenhagen who have, over the past decade, made it a point to poke at perceived boundaries and ask why things can’t be done differently. Brought together by a healthy respect for Denmark’s design heritage but also an open, sometimes against-the-grain philosophy, these five names are poised to lead the way for Copenhagen’s next-gen creative class.
Helle Mardahl
For this former fashion name who burst onto the design scene in 2018 with her colorful blown-glass creations, leaving Copenhagen was the key to better appreciating the city’s appeal. Like many teenagers, Mardahl saw university as a way to escape the limitations of the only place she’d ever lived, so in the late 1990s, she enrolled at Central Saint Martins.
“When I went to London, I couldn’t stand Denmark,” Mardahl admits. “I had to leave because I wasn’t feeling inspired. It took a new place and meeting new people to come back and love it again.”
After returning to Copenhagen in 2001, Mardahl released her first fashion collection—her peers were the likes of Henrik Vibskov, Stine Goya, and the Wood Wood brand—but she soon grew disenchanted with the industry and decided to pivot from sartorial experimentation to art. In 2009, she worked on an installation at Den Blå Planet, the Danish national aquarium. In the process, she worked with a glassmaker, which piqued her interest in the material. “I thought, ‘One day I’m going to come back to this medium.’ ”
In 2018, Mardahl did just that, debuting a lamp at Copenhagen’s 3 Days of Design festival. Egg-shaped and speckled, the handblown-glass orb sat directly on a floor or table—a functional and whimsical design piece that launched her namesake studio onto the global stage. From there, Mardahl hasn’t looked back. Over the years, her work has evolved to include tableware, chandeliers, and the ultra-popular Bon Bon glass objects, all reminiscent of colorful candy, bubble- gum chunks, and cherry-topped treats. “People are always smiling at the shapes or saying the pieces remind them of their childhood,” she notes.
For Mardahl, who opened a new, delightfully pink-doored storefront in Copenhagen in November, bright color has always been at the forefront of her creative practice, which flies in the face of traditional Danish design aesthetics. “We’re such a small country, all living with minimalist architecture and white walls. Fifteen years ago, you didn’t used to see colors aside from beige, white, gray, and maybe blue,” she says, giving credit to her time abroad for opening her mind to new ideas and aesthetic approaches. “The more people you meet and the more interface you have, the more inspired you will get—and bring that back home with you.”
Søren Pihlmann
For better or for worse, architect Søren Pihlmann has always worked for himself. Aside from a brief internship at Copenhagen’s Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter, Pihlmann’s knowledge, experience, and methodology are the result of his education—five years and a master’s in architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts—and an intense curiosity surrounding the physical act of putting together buildings.
“Sometimes I wonder what I’ve missed,” Pihlmann says of not working at an established firm, “but I also think that could be my luck. I missed the old-school way of doing things, so I’ve created my own.”
His approach—a practice rooted in using as much of an existing building as possible in its renovation—blends new thinking with respect for traditional craftsmanship. “One thing I find quite problematic with highly conceptual architecture projects is that if the overall idea doesn’t match the potentials of the building, then you have to fight against it from the beginning, and you will waste a lot of time up front,” he says. “But if you let the building talk or work with it like a team player, your project will unfold itself and be much easier and faster.”
Part of his firm’s ethos rests on questioning the status quo and not building based on turning a profit or fitting in with trends. “When I was studying, there were developments in Copenhagen popping up everywhere and everything looked the same,” Pihlmann recalls. “[It] led me to become interested in understanding how materials are brought to life, how to cultivate our resources, how they can tell stories on their own, and what the logic behind a contemporary building is.”
Three years in, the studio has proved nimble, with projects ranging from an industrial-forward brewery to private summer houses, with a handful of exhibitions and art spaces in between. Of particular note is a forthcoming venture in Copenhagen, in which the team is reconfiguring a 1960s building into a cultural and community center. “We’re seeing how close we can get to only using elements that already exist in it,” Pihlmann says, noting that he’s using the same approach for the exhibition in the Danish pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture, which he was asked to curate. “We wanted to dive deep into that building to figure out what kinds of untold stories might emerge.”
Pihlmann isn’t the only Danish architect interested in shifting away from the conceptual. As technology continues to transform the field, many practitioners seem eager to tap into something more tangible. “We did see a recent shift,” he says, “with the emerging architects in Denmark working in a manner that is more about working with materials as a protagonist of the architecture.”
Thomas Woltmann
Thomas Woltmann likes to take things back to the basics. In 2019, after graduating from the prestigious Design Academy Eindhoven, he moved home to Denmark, landing in Copenhagen to try his hand at making furniture.
“The design scene here is a small bubble, but it’s a good bubble,” Woltmann says. “When I started my studio, I wanted to bring this conceptual and artistic thinking [that I learned at university] down to the ground and concentrate it on more relatable design.” Furniture proved to be a perfect medium for exploring those ideas.
Woltmann’s first post-graduation piece was the Re-C chair, which won a Bolia Design Award in 2021. Minimal and flat-packed, the Re-C is made from recycled elm, pine, ash, and oak, all sourced from various places, including an old church. “There is a story behind the chair that I thought was interesting and gave it another value that goes to deeper levels than just the function of the chair,” Woltmann says. He believes the rise of cheap, mass-manufactured products has caused humans to lose a vital connection to the physical objects in their lives, especially designers who use manufacturers located thousands of miles away from their studios. “You don’t have the same level of day-to-day contact with producers as architects and designers did maybe 50 years ago,” he says.
After developing several furniture pieces—including a wooden bench and an upholstered armchair—Woltmannis shifting his attention to material experimentation, such as developing textiles from nettles or fabric dyes from Danish mineral pigments. He strives to use only regional or recycled materials, looking to the country’s deep craft history to inform the process.
“In light of the whole climate crisis,” he says, “I’m working with what is available locally and looking to the past for some of the answers to our problems.”
Woltmann says that great Danish designers Arne Jacobsen, Finn Juhl, and Hans Wegner will always loom large in the industry, but they themselves embraced progress. “We can lean into that heritage, but we also live in a different world now than we did 70 or 80 years ago,” he says. “We see the manifestation of those values—creating something with natural materials, attention to craftsmanship and longevity, and a sense of simplicity or minimal style. In that way, that spirit is very much still alive.”
Jessica Vedel
From fashion to photography—with stints in Berlin, London, and New York along the way—Jessica Vedel’s path to interior design did not follow the typical school-to-studio pipeline. The creatively inclined Dane started out working for a national fashion brand, where her team designed the look and feel of the company’s stores.
“I guess I always had a passion for interiors,” Vedel says, “and it felt like I had finally landed in the right place.”
In 2011, after a year in Berlin (during which she focused on photography), Vedel moved to London and officially launched her interior-design firm. Her first commissions were decorating a handful of show houses, which she parlayed into designing high-end residences for private clients.
“Then Pinterest came along, and I don’t know what I did before that,” Vedel says. “I started pinning things and sharing my projects, and people started to find me and reach out.” One such inquiry was from a client in New York who invited Vedel to pitch them for a full-gut apartment renovation on the Upper East Side. “I won it, so I closed my office in London, moved to New York, and set up my business.”
In 2018, Vedel moved back to Copenhagen to be closer to family, and once again, reopened her studio in a new locale. Her work, which features bespoke furnishings, intricate architectural details, and sharp attention to form and scale, equalizes Nordic minimalism with cosmopolitan elegance.
“I am very influenced by my Danish roots and the whole Scandinavian design legacy,” she says. “It’s a big, long, beautiful tradition about materials, architecture, and how things are made. But I also lived abroad for many years, so I think I’m a bit more international. I use a little more volume on things… my work is a little heavier and more layered.”
In addition to interiors—next year she has a 1970s-era home just outside Copenhagen on the books for a total renovation—Vedel designs furniture that includes custom pieces for individual projects and collaborations with brands, such as lighting for Nuura, a mirror collection for Mazo, and a sofa that will debut in 2025 with the launch of a new Danish company. It doesn’t matter whether it’s interiors, furniture, or photography: For Vedel, the creative impulse is ever present. “The starting point is always the same,” she says. “It’s a feeling, it’s a vision, it’s a detail that pulls you into the zone.”
Danielle Siggerud
Danielle Siggerud never planned to be an architect. Growing up in Oslo, she favored drawing, building with Legos, and constructing imaginary worlds, but in the years leading up to university, Siggerud focused her studies on preparing to enter the medical field.
“I have this huge interest in working with people in general and helping them,” Siggerud says, “but I also had this huge interest in design and being creative. I’ve always been extremely aware of space and how I interacted with it, how spaces can make me feel, whether good or playful or safe or even the opposite.”
After a long talk with her father, who asked if medicine was her true passion, Siggerud admitted that she was interested in pursuing something more creative. She decided to study architecture and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. “It was there that I developed a strong interest in the restoration of heritage buildings,” the architect recalls.
Through her design work, Siggerud blends her artistic side with her desire to help others. Established in 2016, her firm offers a full range of architecture services, from remodels to new builds in both the residential and hospitality sectors. Siggerud is especially skilled at historic renovations, in which she uses a method she honed working for John Pawson in London, “who shaped my approach to architecture through teaching me holistic consideration of routines and situations of the people who inhabit the spaces we design.”
Siggerud sees her work, which she defines as “refined, minimalism with a strong focus on materiality and tactility,” as an opportunity to interact with the past while elevating the importance of the everyday. She focuses on small rituals or occurrences that are important to the end user, such as adding a hidden matcha station in the kitchen of a client who prepares the beverage for his wife each morning.
In addition to residential projects—she currently has designs in the works in Copenhagen, New York City, Sweden, and Switzerland, among other locales—Siggerud also designs furniture, another entry point into the human side of design. She has new releases slated for 2025 and 2026.
“I try to seamlessly integrate everything like lights, doors, and storage and focus on the things everyone is touching,” Siggerud says. “The wooden floors you step on with your bare foot, stone counters that you touch when you cook. These things in my mind are a sensory experience—it’s where your body interacts with the building.”
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