Danish Design: Function, Craft and the Everyday Modernism of Copenhagen

Sit in a well-made Danish chair and the first thing you notice is not the look of it but the feel: the curve of the back meets your shoulders, the seat gives slightly, and the arms end exactly where your hands want to rest. That attention to the body, to honest materials and to the scale of ordinary rooms is the heart of Danish design, and Copenhagen is where it can be understood up close. The city’s museum collections, furniture makers, showrooms and modern public spaces fill the opening days of our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour through Denmark, Sweden and Finland. This article looks at the ideas behind the chairs and lamps, and at where you can see those ideas at work.

What makes Danish design distinctive?

Three ideas recur whenever Danish designers of the twentieth century explained what they were doing. The first is function: an object should do its job well, and its form should follow from that job rather than from fashion or ornament. The second is material honesty: wood should look and feel like wood, joints should be visible and well cut, and a finish should protect a surface rather than disguise it. The third, less often spoken aloud but present everywhere, is domestic scale. Danish modernism was mostly designed for apartments and small houses, for people who would sit, eat and read in the same few rooms for decades.

None of this was unique to Denmark. The Bauhaus in Germany and the functionalists elsewhere in Europe argued for many of the same principles. What set Denmark apart was the way those modern ideas were absorbed by a strong tradition of skilled cabinetmaking, rather than replacing it. Where some modernists in Europe wanted to start again from a blank sheet, Danish designers tended to keep what was proven, measure it carefully against the human body and build it with exceptional care.

The warmth that results is sometimes confused with hygge, the Danish idea of cosy, unhurried comfort that our article on Denmark’s very own brand of cosiness explores. The two are related but not the same thing. Hygge describes a mood and a way of spending time; Danish design is a working method for making things. A candlelit evening can be hygge in any room, but a chair that still sits comfortably after seventy years is the product of design decisions.

Kaare Klint and the measured chair

If one figure can be credited with setting the direction, it is the architect Kaare Klint. In 1914 he designed a chair for the Faaborg Museum on Funen, a building by the architect Carl Petersen, and in 1924 he founded the furniture school at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Klint taught that good furniture grew from functionality, proportions adapted to the human body, sound craftsmanship and high-quality materials. The emphasis was on refining what already worked rather than inventing novelty for its own sake.

Klint’s own designs show the method. The Red Chair, first designed in 1927 for the lecture hall of the new museum on Bredgade, and the Safari Chair of 1933 are direct, carefully proportioned and built to last. His influence passed to a generation of designers who carried his respect for proportion and material into very different work. Børge Mogensen kept to solid wood, leather and plain construction in pieces such as his Hunting Chair of 1950 and Spanish Chair of 1958. Poul Kjærholm applied the same discipline to steel, in pieces such as the PK22 lounge chair of 1956, showing that Klint’s method did not depend on any one material.

Klint also left a building. Between 1921 and 1926, with Ivar Bentsen and Thorkild Henningsen, he adapted the former Frederiks Hospital on Bredgade, built in 1752 to 1757 to designs by Nicolai Eigtved and Lauritz de Thurah, as the new home of what is now Designmuseum Denmark. The museum opened there in 1926. The long former hospital wards, arranged around the Grønnegården garden, became galleries, and the building remains one of the clearest places to see Danish furniture in the setting its pioneers chose for it.

The cabinetmakers and the architects

Danish design became internationally known through a partnership between two professions. In 1927 the Copenhagen Cabinetmakers’ Guild, worried that cheaper imported furniture would undercut its members, launched an annual exhibition to show what Danish workshops could do. It ran every year until 1966, and its great achievement was to pair master cabinetmakers with architects and designers. Some of those pairings lasted for decades: Hans J. Wegner with Johannes Hansen, Finn Juhl with Niels Vodder, Kaare Klint with Rud. Rasmussen, and Ole Wanscher with A. J. Iversen.

The exhibitions became the proving ground for chairs that are now design classics. In 1949 Wegner’s Round Chair, made by Johannes Hansen, and Finn Juhl’s Chieftain Chair, made by Niels Vodder, both appeared. The American magazine Interiors hailed the Round Chair as the most beautiful chair in the world, and in 1960 John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon sat in it for the first televised presidential debate in the United States, which brought it wider attention still. Wegner’s Wishbone Chair, also designed in 1949, took a different route: it was made in series by Carl Hansen & Søn, a reminder that the same designers worked for workshops and for factories. Børge Mogensen’s Spokeback Sofa of 1945 shows the same blend of plain construction and comfort.

The commercial results were real. Danish furniture exports rose from about 9.8 million kroner in 1953 to about 257.8 million kroner by 1964, with sales peaking around 1963. Those figures matter because they show that the craft tradition was not a museum piece. It was a working industry that found a way to make modern furniture people in many countries wanted to live with.

Light at the human scale: Poul Henningsen

Danish design is not only furniture. The designer Poul Henningsen spent much of his career on a problem most people never think about: how to light a room without glare. His three-shade system, developed over the winter of 1925 to 1926 for an exhibition hall in Copenhagen and produced with Louis Poulsen, used carefully curved, layered shades to control glare, so that a table is lit evenly while nobody at it looks into a bare bulb. He kept refining the idea for decades, and the PH5 pendant followed in 1958.

Henningsen’s lamps are a good example of function shaping form. The curves of the shades are not decoration; each is calculated to control how the light falls. They also reflect the domestic scale of Danish design, with light planned for the kitchen table and the reading chair rather than for a showroom. Once you notice how often a single warm pendant hangs low over a Danish dining table, you begin to see how much thought went into an ordinary evening at home.

Industry joins the workshop: Arne Jacobsen and Fritz Hansen

Arne Jacobsen, who trained as an architect at the Royal Academy, took Danish design in a more industrial direction. In October 1952 the furniture maker Fritz Hansen launched Jacobsen’s Ant chair, first used in the canteen of the Novo pharmaceutical laboratory in Frederiksberg. Its seat and back are shaped from a single sheet of plywood, and the original version stood on three legs. It was light, stackable and cheap enough to produce in quantity, yet it still carried the Danish concern for comfort and good proportion. His Model 3107 chair followed in 1955.

Jacobsen’s Egg and Swan chairs of 1958 were designed for the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, a building Jacobsen also designed, completed in 1960. They show the same thinking stretched to a larger canvas, with one designer considering the building and the furniture together. Our guide to Arne Jacobsen’s furniture and his total-design vision follows that story in more detail.

Fritz Hansen, founded in 1872, is still making these designs. On day four of the tour the group travels about an hour to Allerød to visit the company, and our article on how Fritz Hansen brought modern classics into production explains how a firm that began in traditional cabinetmaking adapted to moulded plywood and modern production without abandoning its standards. It is a useful counterpoint to the hand-built pieces in the museum: the same values applied to a different way of making.

Seeing Danish design in Copenhagen on the tour

The Copenhagen days are arranged so that the principles above can be seen in buildings, streets and workshops rather than only behind glass. Our guide to Copenhagen’s museums, showrooms and public spaces follows those days visit by visit; here the focus is on what each one shows about function, material and scale.

Function and everyday use are easiest to see on the street. On day two, after a sightseeing tour that takes in the square at Amalienborg Palace, home of the Danish royal family since 1794, the Program Leader guides a walk along Strøget, focusing on the Danish interior design labels with flagship stores there. The street is a piece of design history in its own right: it was closed to cars as a trial on 17 November 1962, made permanent in 1964, and runs for about 1.1 kilometres between City Hall Square and Kongens Nytorv. The chairs and lamps described above turn up in its shop windows, at walking pace.

Material and making come together on day four. The group travels about an hour to Allerød to visit Fritz Hansen, then returns to Copenhagen for lunch at Restaurant Paustian and a visit to Paustians Hus, Jørn Utzon’s waterfront furniture showroom, completed in 1987. On the way back the group stops at Superkilen in Nørrebro, a park about 750 metres long designed by the artists’ group Superflex with Bjarke Ingels Group and Topotek1 and opened in 2012, whose 108 plants and objects reflect local residents from 62 countries. Day three’s visit to the Danish Architecture Centre, housed since 2018 in the harbour-front BLOX building by the Dutch practice OMA, sets the furniture in the wider frame of Danish architecture and urban development.

Day five follows design into export and into the museum. A talk at Utzon’s Danform Showroom of 1985 on design in export markets (subject to availability) connects the visits to the export story told above, the showroom of the textile maker Kvadrat shows the same values in fabric, and Designmuseum Denmark, in Klint’s converted hospital on Bredgade, holds the historical record. Domestic scale is clearest on day six at Utzon’s Fredensborg Houses of 1959 to 1962 in North Zealand, a cluster of individual houses built for Danes returning after long years abroad, before an afternoon at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen.

How much walking does the Copenhagen design program involve?

Plan on three to five hours of physical activity a day, which can mean walking up to about 8 kilometres, at times on uneven ground. The tour is graded Level 2 (Moderate), so travellers should be able to carry their own luggage and use stairs. Strøget alone is about 1.1 kilometres end to end.

Is entry to Designmuseum Denmark included?

Yes. The tour includes all excursions, entrance fees and local guides, so the museum visit carries no extra ticket. Opening hours and ticketing for independent visits are set by the museum, so check its official website if you plan to return on your own time.

How is Danish design different from Scandinavian design?

Danish design is one strand of the wider Scandinavian design tradition, with its own emphasis. Denmark’s version is rooted in cabinetmaking and furniture, while Sweden is known as much for glass, textiles and industrial design, and Finland for architecture, glass and bold printed fabrics. The tour follows all three, moving from Copenhagen to Gothenburg, Borås, Växjö and Kosta, Stockholm and Helsinki, so you can compare them directly. Our route guide to Scandinavian design follows the whole journey.

Beyond the design studios

Danish design makes more sense when you know something of the country that produced it. Our guide to discovering Scandinavia and Viking Denmark covers the longer history, from the Viking age through the Kalmar Union to the modern state, and our answers to common questions about Denmark deal with practical matters such as language, food and the best time to visit.

Danish design rewards slow looking. A chair, a lamp or a courtyard house can seem simple at first glance, and the craft only reveals itself when you sit in it, switch it on or walk through it. Copenhagen gives you the chance to do all three, with the makers, the museum and the buildings close together. It is a fitting start to a journey that continues through Sweden’s glassworks and textile towns to the architecture and design houses of Helsinki.