How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (6 page)

You would recognise Danish Modern if you saw it in a sitting room. Most Danish Modern chairs are wooden ones – rich and wholesome in colour; clean and functional in their design. “In Danish and Scandinavian design,” says Nille Juul-Sørensen, designer of the Copenhagen metro stations, and now head of the Danish Design Centre, “if it’s not functional, we think: why the hell should we have it?”

In this respect, the leather-clad Egg is almost frivolous in comparison with its wooden, straight-faced forebears. The Egg would not have been out of place on Kubrick’s spacecraft, but Wegner’s The Chair – with its thin, gently
rounded back and its four functional legs – is more at home at a kitchen table, or even in a classroom. But Danish Modern was about more than specific chairs – and about more than just furniture, in fact. At its most idealistic, it aimed to make Danish homes better places to live in – and the chairs were just one means of doing that.

“Last Sunday a Danish paper wrote about this ‘world-famous Danish furniture designer Arne Jacobsen’,” says an irritated Juul-Sørensen, a bulky man with thick 50s-style glasses. “I thought: should I take the phone and call this stupid journalist? Because Arne Jacobsen was not a furniture designer. He was an architect. And he used architecture to influence a new family life.” In the fifth-storey window behind Juul-Sørensen, you can see the Tivoli Gardens, the world’s most tasteful theme park. As he talks, a rollercoaster plunges groundwards. “At the time, the furniture we had was from a different decade. It was not for modern life. So Jacobsen just redesigned things to fit the new architecture, to fit the new lifestyle. And he needed some chairs [to do that]. He was not a furniture designer; he changed architecture, he changed the way we live.”

Jacobsen was not the father of the movement, however; if anything, he was considered something of a rebel. Kaare Klint, the founder of the furniture department at the Danish Royal Academy, was the man who pioneered Danish Modernism in the 20s. Klint and his contemporaries were inspired by the humanist aims of the Bauhaus movement in Germany, but they felt that Bauhaus buildings and Bauhaus
furniture designs were in practice not particularly humanising. Danish Modern was partly an attempt to do what the Bauhaus hadn’t.

Like most of his contemporaries, Klint had a keen eye for detail. In the 30s, goes the myth, Klint was introduced to the Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund. They talked shop. “What are you working on?” Klint asked.

“Oh, just a school, a hotel and a few houses. What about you?"

“I am working on a chair,” said Klint.

A few years went by before Klint and Asplund ran into each other again. “What are you working on?” Klint asked for the second time. “Oh, a town hall or two,” replied Asplund. “And a couple of villas. What about you?”

“I told you last time,” said Klint. “I am working on a chair.”

This anecdote, told best by Andrew Hollingsworth in his book,
Danish Modern
, highlights another of the movement’s tropes: painstaking craftsmanship. Their furniture was planned in excruciating detail, and was designed to last. Jill, the Fritz Hansen PR, has another way of demonstrating this. Taking a 7 Chair from its display, she places it upside down on the floor, takes off her heels and carefully steps onto the chair’s back. Then she bounces, gingerly. Nothing snaps. “See!” she says, in triumph. “That’s how you know it’s not a fake.”

Ironically, it was this emphasis on quality that killed the movement. By the end of the 60s, says Hollingsworth, consumers
increasingly preferred the brash colours of pop art to the understated Danish aesthetic. Meanwhile, the Danes’ careful craftsmanship could not compete with the mass-produced and mass-marketed pieces made overseas, and in 1966 the Annual Exhibition of Cabinetmakers – for decades a showcase of the best Danish design – folded. In some respects, the decline was partly due to the success of the Danish welfare state. New social legislation – including the introduction of the minimum wage – meant that the cost of labour rose dramatically, which in turn made labour-intensive industries like manufacturing increasingly unprofitable. The manufacturers that remained – like Fritz Hansen and Rud Rasmussen – had to up their prices tenfold, and started
to stick to the designers they knew and trusted, rather than develop younger ones.

If you entered many Danes’ homes today, you would not necessarily realise all this. To put it very glibly, if an Englishman’s home is his castle, the Dane’s home is her temple to the descendants of Kaare Klint. The icons of the 50s and 60s still form the centrepieces of many Danish living rooms, which helps explain why
The Bridge
’s Martin Rohde has a house full of so many design classics. I lost count of the number of houses that have a Poul Henningsen artichoke lamp hanging from the ceiling – something that regular viewers of the political drama
Borgen
(which features
several Henningsens) may recognise. After an interview, a university professor proudly shows me his two prized Børge Mogensen armchairs. At a party in Vesterbro, a geography student in his late twenties says he has just saved up the equivalent of £500 to buy a Jacobsen original.

“A very high percentage of the Danes know about Arne Jacobsen,” says Kristian Byrge, who runs Muuto, a thrusting new furniture company aimed at promoting younger designers. “That’s one of the differences between Denmark and a lot of other countries. We are proud of our design heritage. A lot of people will own his 7 Chair. They might have bought it reduced and repainted it or reworked it, but most people buy an original. It’s something we like our country to be associated with. Design is in our cultural DNA.”

Speaking of Danish DNA, it is hard to continue this discussion about people’s homes without mentioning the very Danish concept of
hygge
. Pronounced roughly “hoo-guh”,
hygge
does not have a direct equivalent in English. It refers to the warm state of relaxation in which Danes find themselves when they’re sitting around a fire with friends, or having a beer in their beach house (another Danish mainstay) on the North Sea in the summer. It is often loosely translated as “cosiness”, but this seems both too broad and yet too specific a translation. When I first arrived in Denmark, I was surprised to hear many people describe all sorts of things as “cosy”. My bike was cosy, their table was cosy, and so too was a walk through Vesterbro. It was
slightly perplexing – until I realised my friends were substituting the adjectival form of
hygge
(
hyggelig
, or “hoogalee”) for the English word “cosy”. Obviously, it doesn’t translate particularly well, rendering the concept less intelligible to an English ear.

Still, it’s safe to say that the attainment of this homely
hygge
(whatever it is exactly) is a constant goal for Danes. In turn, this might help explain both why Denmark has the second-largest homes in Europe (in terms of square metres per capita), and why the Danes are so concerned with making those homes look nice. Since restaurants are so expensive (thanks to a 25% tax on food), many Danes prefer to spend their evenings at home. Interior design is therefore incredibly important, and so too is Arne Jacobsen.

But therein lies a problem. A fixation on past masters is stifling the designers of today. “When you talk Danish design outside Denmark, people believe it’s an old chair,” says Juul-Sørensen, who says he took on his new job in order to challenge that perception. He has an uphill battle, if the exhibits at the Danish Design Museum, a few kilmetres north-east of Juul-Sørensen’s Danish Design Centre, are anything to go by. The fixation with chairs reaches almost comical levels here. As if in a furniture mausoleum, visitors to the museum process past a serpentine line of chairs that never seems to end. Chair after chair after chair; it is like an eery, empty, hyper-extended doctor’s waiting room. “We call it Danish Modern,” laments Juul-Sørensen, “but Danish Modern was actually designed in the 50s and 60s. People don’t
realise that we are now doing a lot of other stuff.”

Thing is, much of that other stuff struggles to get made. Fritz Hansen only release one new piece of furniture a year, and even these ranges tend to be – by their own admission – influenced by the dead designers already in their collection.

“If you were a designer ten years ago,” claims Juul-Sørensen, “you didn’t have a future. A lot of these young designers could not get a job as a chair designer because when they went to Fritz Hansen and said, “Look I have designed this new funky chair,” [Fritz Hansen] would say: “It looks cool, but we have a chair designed in the 50s which sells nine million pieces [a year], so no, not interested.” So these companies squeezed out a whole generation.”

Thomas Bentzen, one of the few designers from that era who did make it, remembers the frustration well. “It was like: ‘I’ve got this table and it’s made completely out of metal and it has this handle so you can move it around. Which Danish company do I want to approach with this? Who would see the good design potential in this table?’ And I’m not sure any of the classic Danish companies would have seen that.”

In Denmark, people are finally making new furniture, but in the main it is produced by young firms like Hay, Gubi, Mater and the aforementioned Muuto – companies set up in the last few years to promote young Danish designers, and to challenge the creative hegemony established by the likes of Fritz Hansen. In fact, some of their most well-known
work is a very obvious piss-take of the classics. Hay’s Nobody Chair is made entirely from fabric, which is a dig at Danish Modern’s obsession with wood – while its very name mocks how the Danish tradition has become so focussed on the identity of individual designers, rather than the ideas they originally stood for. Meanwhile, Muuto’s Rest – a sofa without a strongly defined shape – is a deliberate contrast to the more rigid structures you might find at Fritz Hansen.

This isn’t a criticism of the old furniture firms. The direction they have taken is simply sound business sense, and the work they make is still beautiful. It’s just that they no longer have the same innovative spark that made them so important and exciting in the middle of the last century. This isn’t only because they don’t promote many new designers; they also lack the same democratic values they had in the 50s.

Most of the Danish Modernists did not just want to make good furniture; they wanted to make good furniture that everyone could enjoy. They aspired to make better homes for the masses – and they could do this only if their furniture was both well-made and affordable. This meant that many of the pieces now sold as expensive classics were, 50 years ago, well within the reach of the average Dane. Today, Jacobsen’s 7 Chair costs around £250. When it was first released, the chair cost ten times less. Hans Wegner’s Children’s Chair is now priced at around £70; once it was a tenner. Wegner was one of several designers who made
furniture for FDB, a large chain of cooperative supermarkets. Headed by another Danish Modern icon, Børge Mogensen, FDB’s design department was like a proto-IKEA – except that, unlike the contemporary Swedish firm, the furniture FDB made was not only affordable; it was of an unparalleled quality.