Design in and around Kolding

Morten and Birgitte were kind enough to lend us a car, which allowed us to see quite a bit despite having colds.  Among other things it allowed us to fill up with cheap automobile petrol from the local petrol station.

Julian wrangling with the Roundup container.

One of the most exciting things we went to in the area (apart from Legoland) was Trapholt design museum.  They had some great exhibitions of Danish furniture, some works by Lin Utzon (daughter of the designer of the Sydney Opera House who has designed a lot of crystal and has been doing interior design encouraged by her father since the age of 6) and some nice colourful art.  But most importantly they recently acquired Arne Jacobsen's summer house.

Arne Jacobsen's summer house

The summer house was designed as a prototype for a modular kit house (and as such isn't the finished article) - you decide the outside panels (glass or opaque) and the number of boxes and it's all prefabricated.  Nice.  Unfortunately the guy who owned the company (from my vague memory) died before the project was completed, so Arne ended up keeping the building as the family summer home.  It has some pretty interesting touches, like the indoor / outdoor stove.  I feel that maybe the flue is on the wrong side for heating up the house, but the idea of having one fireplace that serves both as an indoor fire and an outdoors bbq is really nice.

You may now be asking, who's Arne Jacobsen.  Well he's just one of the greatest Danish chair designers.

This is the famous egg chair, designed in 1956 and available in reproduction from all sorts of American online shops from USD 400 - 1300.  Seems almost a bargain!  Beside it the ant chair, which is really neat, the three legged design not only stacks well, but it also fits better under the table, also still in production.

There were lots of other great things to be seen at Trapholt (mainly chairs), which Julian & I have blogged about before, but the one below was sad and left out....

another neat chair at Trapholt

Morten and Birgitte have done an amazing job on building their own home, so they were great people to talk to about building, as were their neighbours who were making new bathrooms at that time.  One of the neighbour's suggestions was to have a look at the building design centre (other pictures here).

And this is some neat modular furniture at the building centre in Kolding - many medium sized towns in Denmark have such display cases for building ideas, materials and of course companies.

This is a really neat Danish bin design, a piece of bent steel, which is at an angle so that the plastic bag is under tension and held in and on.

Birgitte also took us to the local farm museum, which is something her father was instrumental in setting up (he liked to collect old farming equipment), so she grew up with a lot of the items on display.

you can see a lot of equipment in this picture, I'm playing with the potato digger.

Old wood fired stoves had rings that you remove to place a pan of the correct size in to heat.  This is a waffle pan designed to be used in this fashion.

This collection of bank notes really interested me, as it has a 20 German mark (DM) note from about 1923 and then a 20 billion DM note from about 1926.  I'd read about this inflation but it was fantastic to see it and understand how quickly it occured.  Of course this wiped out everyone's savings and was one of the factors leading to WWII.  Kolding is really quite close to the German border in these days of automobiles and is still on the trade route to Germany.

The Danes do a lot of things differently to the way we're accustomed to from England, Australia, France & Germany.  And I have to admit, that actually they do a lot of things better.  And I'm not just talking about chair design.  They have a very strong social system, employees (especially of the government) get great holidays and child care allowances.  Youth is integrated into society, which I'm guessing saves a huge amount of money as even if a child breaks a bus shelter or graffitis something, they then end up working with an adult in their community to repair the damage and the do not repeat the experience.  Of course this will be less effective in larger towns.  And they also BBQ differently.  I'm going to keep my head down on this one, but they do a great job of rare grilling sides of beef and grilling through turkey and herb cheese rolls.

A casual Friday night bbq for 80 or so volunteers from the local youth organisation.  The youth have a meeting room with a dozen computers, a projector for karaoke, pool and table tennis tables and three adults helping out, who also lend a sympathetic ear if the kids need someone to talk to who is not their parents.

Morten and Birgitte are very well organised so having a large event like this was no trouble for them at all, they are a great example of how important it is to pick your battles (and work together).

Birgitte's table decorations for the bbq - simple, using items from the kitchen / garden.  We watch the French version of Come Dine with Me here in France, Un Diner Presque Parfait, and they make this kind of effort to decorate their tables too.   Maybe a little practise is all I need.

We left Kolding having learnt and experienced a lot about Danish life with many ideas for our future projects and most impressed by Morten and Birgitte's enthusiasm and drive.  Hopefully we'll be back one day soon.

Can you see Morten & Birgitte flying by, taking photos of us as we leave???