The theme for this year’s annual Danish Cabinetmakers’ autumn exhibition — held at the Oregaard Museum in Copenhagen in September and due to travel to Paris’s Maison du Danemark in January — was “petite”, the designs being a maximum size of 60cm by 60cm. But looking at the furniture by the 30 exhibitors, the brief could have been something else entirely.
From TAF’s metal champagne tray table to Norm Architects’ three-legged folding chair, the designs resemble a line drawing turned into furniture. “We decided to make this year’s theme ‘petite’ purely because our exhibition space was very small,” says Mia Lagerman, chairwoman of the cabinetmakers’ exhibition association. “The designers don’t discuss the work before it’s shown, so there must have been something in the air that caused many of the pieces to have such fragile lines.”
It is not only Danish designers whose work resembles precise pen strokes. French-Polish designer Marta Bakowski launched her collection of Rays lights at Paris’s Maison & Objet fair this autumn. Each is made of a circular acrylic panel with a mirror LED bulb at the centre surrounded by hand-woven, two-tone threads that represent rays of light.