Highlights From This Year’s 3daysofdesign Festival in Copenhagen

Organized around the theme Dare to Dream, the latest edition of Copenhagen’s annual design celebration was a feast for the imagination.

Writer Lauren Gallow

Photo by Laura Stamer

Founded in 2013, Copenhagen’s annual 3daysofdesign festival is entering its heyday, emerging as one of the most anticipated international design weeks in the world. What began as a small event in a warehouse has expanded to hundreds of exhibitors showing work in nearly a dozen Copenhagen neighbourhoods, featuring work from Denmark, Scandinavia, and beyond. This year, the festival was organized around the theme Dare to Dream. “Integral to our ambitions was a desire to provide a platform for visionaries to realize their dreams through the power of community and connection,” the festival’s director and founder Signe Byrdal Terenziani said.

In showrooms, galleries, event spaces, and public forums across the city, a collection of independent designers, artists, and brands came together to share the latest in contemporary design. The celebration from June 12 to 14 saw an international audience of design enthusiasts flock to the city, all looking to get inspired and find a renewed sense of camaraderie with a global design community. Here, we spotlight a few of our favourite festival offerings.

Enter the Salon Photo by Jonathan Hokklo

Island of Wellbeing Photo by Laura Stamer

Photo by Laura Stamer

Fritz Hansen

Heritage furniture brand Fritz Hansen has long been synonymous with Danish design, having collaborated with such design icons as Arne Jacobsen, Hans J. Wegner, and Poul Kjærholm. This year, Fritz Hansen brought its ethos of quality and responsible creation squarely into the present with a series of exhibitions at Copenhagen’s newest waterfront developments, all designed by local architecture firm Cobe.

The first, at the new Operaparken, where a green-roofed, flower-shaped building sits amidst a series of six gardens holding over 600 trees, Fritz Hansen played off the idea of wellness and pausing in nature, showcasing its new outdoor furniture collection sprinkled throughout the park. Across the harbour, inside a sprawling industrial space at the new Paper Island development, the brand presented its latest workplace collections alongside its ReNew project, which encourages a circular economy for its products. “Our quest is to continue to make more circular models for what we do,” Christian Andresen, creative experience director of Fritz Hansen, explained. “It’s a big, gigantic task, but we have the ability, and we think this is what the future will bring.”

Photo by Laura Stamer

Enter the Salon

Some of the most engaging exhibitions at the festival were group shows, combining perspectives and varied approaches from an international troupe of designers. Enter the Salon was just such an offering, curated by Signe Hytte and featuring works by designers from Japan, New York, Portugal, Sweden, and of course, Denmark. Housed across two levels of The Conary, a townhouse in the heart of Copenhagen, the exhibit offered spaces for quiet reflection over a wide range of housewares, lighting, table objects, and artworks.

For New York- and Seattle-based Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, which presented two new ethereal lighting collections and a collection of illuminated fabric wall hangings in collaboration with Sahco and Kvadrat textiles, the exhibit marked its first showing at the festival. “The real appeal of 3daysofdesign is the opportunity to engage with like minds,” the studio’s co-founder Dylan Davis explained. “We’ve found so much synergy with people we’ve met from all over the world who share similar sensibilities about forms of design that are more modest and quiet than other larger-scale design weeks.” At Enter the Salon, even during the bustling opening night, the restrained collection of objects brought about a sense of calm elegance.

Photo by Jonathan Hokklo

Photo by Jonathan Hokklo

Centuries

While much of the festival focused on contemporary design and new product launches, a standout show turned its gaze upon history. Titled Centuries, the exhibition from Montana-based gallery Emerson Bailey featured a collection of Scandinavian design from the 18th century to today. As Emerson Bailey is known for its curation of one-of-a-kind pieces from across the ages, Centuries was an opportunity to place objects from different centuries next to one another and allow common threads to emerge.

Curated by Scandinavian antiques dealer Daniel Larsson, the exhibit was a rare opportunity among the frenzy of 3daysofdesign to slow down and ponder the place of history in contemporary Danish design. “I wanted to show that you can mix Scandinavian pieces and antiques from all the centuries together, and it just works,” Larsson explained. “I’ve been at our design week since the beginning, and it’s just grown and grown. Now there’s an international crew here, so we wanted to promote our Scandinavian design heritage to the rest of the world.”