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???

Hoegenaes ceramics

I went to the Hoegenaes museum on my own, and luckily there weren't many people there, so I could not feel too embarassed about taking heaps of photos of the lovely ceramics.

Inside one of the old kilns, surrounded by the traditional salt glazed pottery

lovely accordeonist

Aake Holm - famous ceramicist's troll figures.  They make me laugh.

I thought Leanne would like this pig..

I really like the shape of these pots

I love the geometric pattern on these pots, which were also for sale at the museum shop, but....

A few of my favourite things (in Denmark)

I'm a bit behind with my blogging, but I'm sure you can still notice that we've spent a lot of time in Denmark.  Probably around 6 weeks over 3 separate visits.  So the question is what is so special about Denmark.  In no particular order:

1) The people.  They really are wonderfully kind, interesting and helpful.  Big thanks to Regnar and Eva; Birgitte and Morten; Lars, Catrine and of course Mercedes; Rune; Aasbjoern; Patrick and the many others who have helped make our trip so much fun.

and how could I leave out Legoland???

I could add a lot about the society here, but will attempt to keep it brief.  Kids are treated as humans, and have a lot of fun at school.  They often spend a year at a special school like the one we visited with Rune on Samso where they stay as boarders and get to do lots of really fun courses (parachuting anyone?).  The community looks after its kids with all adults keeping an eye out for the young and provides several great services including areas where youth can hang out with adult supervision with computers for gaming, pool and table tennis tables and karaoke machines.  Most of the local youth seems to spend time at such youth centres and to develop a positive relationship with adults not their own parents.  There are also special morning screenings at the cinema for mothers: the babies are left in their prams outside the cinema with half a ticket stub on them and if they start screaming and staff or other adults can't calm them, the mother will then be found.

6 weeks a year holidays in the public service, plus 2 days per child off to look after them when they are sick.  Fabulous.

2)  Paalaegschokolade.  Really thin slices of chocolate that are eaten on white bread for breakfast.  Nicer than nutella and definitely a smaller portion than what I end up spreading.

3)  Concentrated fruit juice.  You can buy the concentrate and reconstitute it yourself, saving on packaging and transport, brilliant!

This is just the one glass variety you get at conferences, but the same 1:4 principle applies!

4)  The fish.

Julian about to enjoy his platter

5)  The chairs.   We went to some fabulous shops and design museums in Aarhus, Copenhagen and Kolding and discovered that what I have previously found so elusive; furniture that is comfortable, is a given in Denmark and also looks good.  Of course it has an associated price tag, but considering how much time you spend at the dinner table or on the sofa, how could it not be worth it!  I would love to hear your thoughts and inspirations on good and bad furniture buys.

This is not in a design shop, but someone's home.  These fabulous chairs are comfortable sitting up straight or sitting sideways with your legs across the arm.

Comfortable dining chairs, who would have thought of it?

Note the fabulous cast concrete design museum.  Pity the roof leaks!

6)  There are many other great building design elements that I love, but of course I'm looking with the eyes of someone about to build.

Note double sided stove, light shades and my favourite roofing: a mix of saw offcuts and concrete that looks great and absorbs a huge amount of sound.

No more mucky cleaning around the base of the tap and mouldy silicon when your tap comes out of the wall.  The drawers also open themselves when you push against them, great for when you are cooking.

Flying the rugged Norwegian terrain

Eventually it was time for us to depart Siljansnaes, which was really sad as we greatly enjoyed it there.  And there were so many more places to investigate in the region.

Goodbye Siljansnaes!

Swedish lakes en route

Well hello Norway

But the weather looked ok for Norway so we thought we'd better take the opportunity.  So we went out to Reinsvoll.  And landed uphill on a very strange texture.  When we got out of the plane our feet sank into a mix of gravel and fine clay and water.  Hmmmm.

Note the slope & the rivers on the runway....

No one around so considering the miserable weather we decided to keep going to Klanten.  At Klanten we were very lucky that Arne was able to come and see us after work (9.30pm!) and help us out with petrol.

I love the aeroplane cut out from the Klanten aeroclub's shutters!

The next day the weather was still not so fantastic, so we got to meet some club members and a whole group from flying for the disabled.  I have to admit that this seems to me to be a much more exciting excursion than riding for the disabled....

Just a short discursion into the differences between Sweden & Norway from the air.  Sweden is predominantly a land of forestry, it appears to be divided into a patchwork of fields with pine trees of different ages.  As soon as we crossed the border to Norway all the land was covered in yellow wheat fields.  Which we initially attributed to the harshness of most of the land making people make the most of any arable land, but in fact turns out to be due to large subsidies paid by the government to the farmers, as Norway is a country very wealthy from its oil fields.

Klanten - we camped next to the trampoline

And again off topic - loved the pine clad bathroom, when you have a shower it smells like the sauna, mmmm.

In the afternoon the weather had cleared a bit and since the forecast was not improving over the next few days, we decided to see if we could make it over the mountains to the Sogndal fjord.  We kept a good eye on the wind direction (as it causes up- and down- drafts on the mountain faces, and the last thing you want is to be blown onto a Norwegian mountain peak!) and approached with great caution and always an eye to being able to turn back.  I have to say that it was incredibly stunningly beautiful, if incredibly harsh and unforgiving. On many occasions I wished I could zoom out further to capture the amazing views.  I've been to the South Island of New Zealand and seen their fjords, whcih people say look like Norway.  And I have to say that Norway looks a lot more like Norway.  Amazing.

check out the mist in the next valley

Awesome terrain

steep drops into the valley

Bad weather out the left window, inc snow

more hills

and here the fjord is starting

crazy mountains