Lessons in Danish Design

(This article originally featured in Ireland's Homes Interiors & Living Magazine, September 2024 edition).

The Maven team reflect on savouring slow interiors and making considered choices, following a recent buying trip to Copenhagen.

Every year, design lovers press, bloggers, buyers, designers and architects make a pilgrimage to Copenhagen for the 3daysofdesign festival to get a first look at new concepts from a curated selection of leading brands from Denmark and around the world. Amongst those vying for a cherished look at the new collections this summer were the team from popular Belfast interiors boutique, Maven. Sarah Hannah and Catherine McGinnis take us behind the scenes to share the inspiration and core pieces they will be bringing back to Belfast.

We aim to send a delegation to 3daysofdesign every year. It’s great for our team to meet the brands we work with, learn about new launches and become inspired by the best examples of styling and design that the world has to offer. It’s no hardship to attend a few parties whilst we’re there too!  

Movements v Trends

Trends in furniture, homeware and lighting design thankfully do not move as worryingly rapidly as in the fashion world, and a lot of our brands are led by creating great quality, timeless pieces that will stand the test of time. This does not mean that things stand still, but rather that they move in a slower much more considered way, enabling us to enjoy treasured pieces for years. ‘Trends’ are more ‘movements’ responding to the changes in the way we live and developments in materials and attitudes to sustainability. Often, we see the same pieces in collections year after year and are inspired by how the context and styling can reinvent them completely.

Re-imagining of Design Icons

We’re continuing to see lots of inspiration from design icons, with many of our brands reissuing classic pieces. &Tradition, in close collaboration with the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation, have reissued five distinct designs from Robin Day’s iconic furniture collection for the Royal Festival Hall, some of which will be available to purchase for the first time in history.

RFH Lounge Chair by Robin Day for &Tradition

Gubitakes its inspiration from the work of Anni and Josef Albers – the pioneering 20th-century Bauhaus artists whose work, writing, and teaching transformed our understanding of the relationship between colour and perception, art and craft. The revived F300 chair originally created in the late 60s by French designer Pierre Paulin has been re-engineered for a 21st century audience in new materials and colourways that respect its past and sets it firmly in the now.

F300 Chair by Pierre Paulin for GUBI launching 2025

Pieces that Work Hard

Pieces that offer flexibility in our homes and work-spaces were in. Our homes are less static than they once might have been and furniture that can adapt as our lives change is increasingly in demand. 

The MuutoStacked System is exactly the kind of piece that meets this requirement – it lets you plan a configuration to suit your space and adapts to all kinds of objects, whether you need a bookcase, or somewhere to store decorative objects, or a hybrid. With a fresh colour palette for autumn ’24 and new components, it’s a system that continues to evolve, so you can scale up or down as you need to, to keep up with life’s changes.

Stacked Shelving System from Muuto

Designed for HAYby Dutch designer Stefan Scholten, Facet Cabinet is a versatile, multifunctional storage solution that is easy to move around, enabling it to be used in a wide variety of rooms and contexts – from a bedside cabinet to a side table in the sitting room, or a stationery organiser in the home office. 

Facet Cabinet by HAY

Portable lights are showing no sign of going anywhere, with more and more brands adding them to their ranges, and with such strident advances in battery life, it's no wonder that a new generation of chargeable and portable lights has sprung up. Portable lights offer the ultimate flexibility; carry them from room to room, indoors to outdoors; keep the wires tidied away and bring light anywhere you need to. 

Flowerpot VP9 Portable Table Lamp

Its items like these, that can work in multiple settings, that we’re seeing more and more of in Danish design. We returned inspired by this growing ‘slower interiors’ movement, which fits our ethos of curating a collection of considered pieces that will stand the test of time.