The Greatest Discoveries We Made During 3daysofdesign

3daysofdesign, the need-to-know annual design festival that lands in Copenhagen each May, is Denmark’s answer to the design fair. The eminently pedestrian-friendly and bikeable city sees exhibitions and showrooms open their doors at almost every corner, unveiling the latest and greatest of Danish design. Under the creative direction of Signe Terenziani, 3daysofdesign has flourished—the citywide affair has grown from a singular showroom event to a mainstay on the international design calendar that now features more than 157 participants.

Unlike some design fairs, 3daysofdesign caters to the commercial side by offering attendees a thorough overview of major showrooms and their latest product launches. As part of this year’s festival, the Danish Arts and Culture Foundation curated an intimate tour of Copenhagen’s local design community in context with their latest work and studio spaces. Below, we round up this year’s standout exhibitions and most exciting independent design discoveries.

Karimoku Case Study was the perfect storm of aesthetics and tradition, marking the inaugural collaboration between Japanese furniture brand Karimoku, Keiji Ashizawa Design, and Copenhagen’s own Norm Architects. The collaborators created a calming environment, on view at the offices of Kinfolk, that blends Norm’s signature minimalism with the elegant, pared-down touch of Japanese craftsmanship.

Menu debuted The Audo, a livable concept store that combines a curated showroom, boutique hotel, restaurant, café, and material library—also designed by Norm Architects. Given Menu and Norm’s penchant for minimalism, the space skews sensual, comfortable, and home-like, perhaps from a collection of curated vintage and contemporary ceramics paired with Kvadrat and Dedar fabrics used throughout.

Kristian Snorre and Martin Clausen launched e-commerce platform and gallery Adorno to help bring diversity to the world of collectible design. The duo presented “NOVI-VIXX (The New Six),” an exhibition curated by Pil Bredahl that assembled six multidisciplinary female designers who continuously push boundaries of material and form.

Chris L. Halstrøm welcomed festival-goers inside her airy central Copenhagen studio to present a new foray into commercial product design, which includes a brand-new outdoor furniture collection for Design Within Reach and interiors for off-the-grid Danish getaway Svinkløv Badehotel.

Mathias Weber, who founded his eponymous Copenhagen studio in 2013 after cutting his teeth at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Denmark, employs clever techniques to achieve beguilingly simple design details. His stackable chair, for example, appears deceptively minimal but features an unusually angled backrest and complex joinery.

The National Danish Workshops, which selects designers to create objects without any overhead in a fully equipped studio, tapped local firm MBADV for this year’s run. The founders, Anne Dorthe Vester and Maria Bruun, explore the cross-section of architecture, design, and art, and create gallery-level pieces that combine abstraction and the aesthetics of material and form. Their approach is more than evident in Heavy Stack, an object that features stacked hollow extruded ceramic rings surrounding a load-bearing oak construction—it’s a distinctly architectural piece whose materiality suggests artisanal craftsmanship.

The historic Hotel Charlottenborg presented an interactive group exhibition that encompassed more than a dozen contemporary Danish furniture brands including Fritz Hansen and Magnus Olesen. Festival-goers relished in the serene environs, which were curated by up-and-coming design publication Ark Journal in partnership with the Association of Danish Wood and Furniture Industries.

At the Nomad Workspace, Spatial Code and Who’s Agency presented DAWN as a curated platform for both emerging and established designers to tell visual stories in a contextual environment. Newly unveiled objects by Helle Mardahl, Kristel Laurits and Ida Elke took pride of place and helped conjure nature-like settings.