Midcentury's only played out if you do it wrong
Reconnecting with the fundamentals, plus mad cool museums & parks in our "Ultimate Copenhagen Experience" Finale
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
On Tuesday we served up Part One of our “Ultimate Copenhagen Experience” Spyplane City Guide. Now it’s time for The FINALE.
Friends — shout out to Copenhagen. Erin and I (Jonah) have been a few times before and we always liked it, but this time we loved it. Really nice people, many of whom are sui generis swaggy fit wizards … Benzes the size of Honda Fits (RIP) … even rarer ill ‘90s-era Toyota subcompacts … Honking food … And a bunch of other miscellaneous fly s**t …
I strapped on BBSP’s No. 1 sneakers of 2023 (above left), which recently got a restock, so that I could engage in 7 consecutive days of 15k+ steps while looking cool but comforting my doggies … Erin took advantage of the crisp early-summer air to stack her cuffs S.Y.C.K. style (above middle) …
As detailed in Part One, we ate real good. Today we’re spotlighting a tight clutch of:
beautiful things to do,
beautiful places to go, and
a sprawling warehouse full of beautiful things to enviben your home, specifically midcentury Danish furniture, lighting and bric-a-brac, priced for the lowskioli… As lowskioli as like $20 for Artek Aalto stools by the stack. We spent several hours wandering through the crammed aisles, and the place had us pricing out a shipping crate (that’s crate, not container, let’s be clear) from CPH to California… We didn’t go through with it but when you tallied everything up, the math kinda “made sense”??
When you see a “📀” below, that’s a DVD-ROM: Dope Vibey D*mn Recon Ordnance Marker.
First up —
Our love of Copenhagen was deepened by 2 easy yet profoundly transportive day trips.
One is to the world-class 📀 Louisiana Museum, a gorgeous place that anyone operating at even sub-Mach 1+ levels will correctly tell you to visit when you’re in CPH. They’ve got a storied history & tremendous permanent collection, including a vast cave devoted to William Kentridge, and several giant Calders overlooking the Baltic Sea (below top right)… They’ve also got great modern & contemporary programming… The location & grounds are worth the entry price alone.
The other day trip, however, is more slept ‘pon, and it packs a DOUBLE-FORCE PUNCH…
We’re talking about the 📀 Finn Juhl House, which sits immediately next to the 📀Ordrupgaard Museum, both pictured above. If we hadn’t made the short trip up here, our time in Denmark would have been substantially less fun.
Ordrupgaard, which opened in 1918, began life as a three-winged neoclassical mansion. It’s full of charming old mansion-a**-type s**t (e.g. the “servant’s kitchen”-looking room above bottom right) and the work of Danish landscape painters I assume are goated with these oils because they’re hung alongside a bunch of French impressionist & post-impressionist masters, e.g. Degas, Renoir, Manet, Matisse, Monet, and Gauguin.
The mansion also has a very sick extension, glimpsed above middle right, by architecture & design superstars Snøhetta and Zaha Hadid, and it hosts a fantastic restaurant and contemporary exhibits. (There was an Ai Wei Wei thing up when we went.) The grounds are peppered with enormous sculptures too.
Just over some hedges, however, is the primary reason we came, the Finn Juhl House.
Before we go any further, Spy Nation — I gotta come clean with a “Spyplane Confession.” When it comes to the midcentury furniture pantheon, I f**k with Hans Wegner, with Peter Hvidt and Orla Mørlgard, with Charlotte Perriand, with Bruno Mathsson, with Jens Risom, with Isamu Noguchi, with Eero Saarinen … f**k it, I f**k with Harry Bertoia and Joe Colombo too!!
But while I’ve respected the Danish architect & furniture designer Finn Juhl, I was not putting the proper respect on man’s name. An hour spent in the radiant stillness of his home, among his beautiful creations, made that abundantly clear.
Bedroom walls covered with sisal… chairs, beds, tables and sofas assembled from subtly undulating & glowing good wood… that living-room fireplace lifting out from a wall in one rounded, continuous piece, like someone gently tugging on a marshmallow … the polished-metal bedside sconce, curved softly like Snoopy’s head (pictured above) had me and Erin in CONNIPTIONS.
“Midcentury” interior design has become a familiar and in many cases corny / debased / played-out trope circa 2024, but the Juhl house — clean but never cold, composed but crackling with life — reminds us of Georgia O’Keefe’s desert MCM Abiquiu compound in the way it captures the style at its cliché-rejecting best.
Speaking of which —
With so much fire midcentury furniture all over the d*mn place, we were extra amped up to visit a 📀 massive warehouse market packed almost literally to its rafters with ill midcentury pieces — some by big names, others obscure but nonetheless yanking, some cheap in absolute terms, others priced at a bargain relative to the international market.
The place is chaotic and at times charmingly junkyard-vibed… but the heaps are diamond-rich. Case in point: During our first 20 minutes there I spotted two vintage Hans Wegner oak wishbone chairs (below top left) for ~$800 each… which someone quickly snapped up…. I spotted Vernor Panton flowerpot pendants for about $150 (below middle right) …
We were like, “D*mn, if we lived in CPH we could gradually outfit the cribbo sublimely for not a ton of kroners…”
But then a chill guy working at the market with a long ponytail told us that you can arrange a like 4’x9’ shipping crate to California for $1000 USD… (it would cost less to NYC) which would “pay for itself” if you found enough pieces priced low enough to fill the crate… We considered going in on a crate with a buddy but gave the idea a miss because we are not in the market for quite that much furniture and also we are not on our Import Export grind… But, man, we were tempted.
Especially when we saw the original canvas Erik Ole Jørgensen J361 easy chair below top right asking $2100 — a bit out of our budget, but it goes for twice as much on, like, 1stDibs.
Finding the warehouse is slightly tricky, and the timing is key: