Form & Refine – the new Danish design brand championing sustainability

All images courtesy Form & Refine

I recently got back from a lovely and inspiring trip to 3 Days of Design – it’s a design event held each year in Copenhagen where some 150 Scandinavian design brands reveal their new concepts and designs.

Set across stunning showrooms and otherwise hidden spaces within the Danish city, it’s the antithesis of a trade show, taking on a far slower and more considered pace than Milan furniture fair earlier in the year. Here, there’s a focus on quality and well-designed furniture with a strong back story. At each place, you’re invited to stop a while, have a coffee, chat to designers or brand founders, and get to know the way they work and what they do (if you’re not on the whistle-stop press tour that is, which I wasn’t).

What comes across is not necessarily the newness of specific pieces, but the passion the Danes have for their design heritage and how products are made. I like that the show isn’t flashy and that there’s more of a focus on the spaces and how they feel to be in than the designs themselves. In a beautiful setting and styled well, a good product will sell itself – you don’t need to shout about it. The Danes take a considered, modest approach – you can tell because they all seem to be supportive of one another, working towards the same goal of creating good design made to last.

Recently, much like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking more about sustainability and the environmental effects of producing furniture. When I buy a piece of furniture for my home, I want to know where it is made and by whose hands. I want to know how far the material has travelled and if the company values the makers, artisans and craftsmen creating the designs. I was delighted to meet Form & Refine at the Hotel Charlottenburg exhibition at 3 Days of Design – a new Danish brand that you need to know about.

Founded in 2018 by Helle Herman Mortensen, Jonas Herman Pedersen and Lasse Lund Lauridsen, Form & Refine have set out to create a value-driven brand (read: ethical value rather than monetary value) that ‘explores materials and preserves our earth and craft cultures’.

They create modest yet elegant, Nordic-inspired furniture designs, prioritising social responsibility, sustainability and long-lasting design. They work closely with cooperatives to create fair and respectful partnerships, and carefully choose local materials and the skilled craftsmen who work with them to help reduce a design’s footprint. Material and craft is their great passion, whether it’s a cooperative of alpaca farmers in the highlands of Bolivia, the ancient pottery techniques of Alcobaça in Portugal, or the wood of the forest Damsbo on the island of Funen in Denmark. They say:

‘We see design as an expression but equally important as a functional object that never compromises on quality. In our opinion that is the foundation for long-lasting design that will refine through generations.

So, in the end we Form and Refine wholesome materials with a sustainable path – creating items with care and craftsmanship using elements that stand the test of time.’

At 3 Days of Design, I chatted to founder Helle Herman Mortensen about the concept behind the new brand and their take on sustainability. 

So tell me a bit about Form & Refine – what’s your approach to sustainability? 

There’s many ways to go about it, but our take on sustainability is that we have chosen to work with Danish wood from a local forest. We have the pieces cut in a Danish saw mill and we also produce the designs in Denmark. So we minimise the transportation between different places. Our thoughts around sustainability is all about the the products being produced close to the source. For example with our textile line, the alpaca wool is produced in Bolivia in the same place where the alpaca come from. 

We have three stories that we have based the collection on – In Praise of Wood, In Praise of Alpaca and In Praise of Ceramic. We would like to expand on that but always be true about the materials and where they come from. 

That’s true about sustainability, you can have the most sustainable material but if it’s travelling across the world, that’s no longer quite as sustainable anymore

Exactly. Of course we’re using sustainable materials but they’re also long lasting materials, so that’s another thought about sustainability – we’re designing furniture with a long life. Jonas and I are the designers behind the collections and we work a lot around concepts of stability, simplicity and timelessness. Those are our key design parameters at Form & Refine.

Yes that’s another argument, if you make a piece that’s built to last and you keep it forever, and maybe even pass it to your children, that in a way is sustainable because you’re not needing to go out and buy another bench or another table to replace it

And maybe it might be a bit expensive for people to buy, because we’re not a low cost brand, but what we think is it’s better and safer for the environment to have a product for a longer period. That’s also why we’ve been so limited with the use of colour. Yes it can be a bit plain but we think that it’s important to have some furniture that you can look at for a long period. You can always add on small accessories to create a colourful universe.

That’s definitely how I like to decorate – to have the walls and main pieces of furniture as a neutral backdrop for everything else to tell the story, so your everyday life and personality brings the colour, texture and interest

Where do you find inspiration for the shapes and the form of the pieces?

We are Danes and of course the Danish design tradition is in our DNA. That might also be a bit clear here. We are both educated architects so we really love the geometric shapes and the straight lines, and that’s very much our background. We have a design studio, Herman Studio, which we’ve been running for seven years, mainly designing for other brands but now we’re just launched our own thing.

Were you inspired by the Bauhaus? I can see some Bauhaus style forms in the shapes of the designs.

Yes exactly, especially with the ceramic line. We like the Bauhaus geometric shapes and the way they connect with each other.

Can you tell me about the Aymara alpaca throws?

We’ve been in Bolivia visiting our producers there. It’s a cooperative so it’s owned by 200 farmers in Bolivia – every five years they select new presidents and that’s the farmers themselves, and they run the company. It’s a lovely culture and wonderful to visit them.

What plans do you have for the brand – where do you see Form & Refine in 5 years time?

We hope to work much more with the subject of sustainability but maybe in another way. Our next line will be made of off-cuts – off-cuts of wood from other brands. They might reject some pieces because they have small defects. And that’s our challenge as designers to see the beauty in that and make maybe a collection that can carry that as a design feature. We also have a collaboration with Kvadrat using their off-cuts, which will be out very soon.

We hope not to come with too many new collections every year, we want to work more slowly. Things take time, these designs for instance took three years before we saw them come to life.

I really respect that because, when I go to Milan furniture fair, I come away with an uncomfortable feeling about all these new product launches and endless new chairs, so I like to see brands that really stick to what they do well and so don’t need to fight for attention just for the sake of news. Very exciting, thank you so much for chatting to me and letting us get to know Form & Refine!