Fredericia, the 107-year-old Danish furniture business, has opened its first showroom outside of Denmark, in London’s contract furniture heartland: Clerkenwell.
The 1,000 sq ft space in a former Victorian warehouse stocks the Modern Originals collection, designed by the likes of Børge Mogensen, Jasper Morrison and Space Copenhagen. Meanwhile its bestselling polypropylene chair Pato, designed by Danish-Icelandic duo Welling/Ludvik in 2013, will stand on a newly-built storage unit as a window display.
The upper-ground-floor showroom is triple aspect, bringing in lots of light through the large, black, metal-framed windows. These were already in place, as were the stripped floorboards and four black steel support columns in the centre of the room. Fredericia’s inhouse design team has made a feature of these by putting up a curtain rail inside the square created by the columns. A white linen, semi-transparent curtain from Kvadrat acts as an informal room divider and doubles as another ‘wall’ against which to position the sofas and easy chairs. ‘We have the same in Copenhagen,’ says Fredericia’s CEO Kaja Møller, ‘as a statement.’
As for the walls, these were repainted white, while the lighting – ceiling lights from Danish company Anker & Co and table lamps from Wästberg in Sweden – are all black. ‘There’s so much warmth and tactility with our furniture that it’s good have plain black and white,’ as a backdrop, says Møller.
The London outlet is bijou compared with the 11,000 sq ft showroom in Copenhagen – housed in a former post office – which opened in 2016. But Møller has high hopes for it. ‘Business is booming, particularly in the hospitality and office sectors, and London is a hub for a global audience (of architects and interior designers),’ she says, and through the showroom ‘we want to communicate that we are an international company that wants to expand worldwide.’ §
