In case you missed it, Scandinavian designis having a moment (or, rather, a continuous repetition of a "moment" that's been pinging between the woodworking shops of Copenhagen, oil-funded civic architecture in Oslo, black-leather-clad fashion ateliers of Stockholm, and Pop-art-inspired studios in Helsinki for the better part of a century). In any case, the new generation of Danish design has proven to be a particularly worthy export: it's not aggressive, it's pleasing to the eye and to the hand, it's colorful but not raucous, and it imbues spaces with a sense of hygge—a sense of coziness only articulated by, well, Danes.
Leading the pack is HAY, which was founded 13 years ago by husband-and-wife duo Rolf and Mette Hay. The pair has exercised its vision of palatable, friendly, everyday design at every scale—from coat racks to stationery to sofas to bedding to rugs—with the help of collaborators famous (Scholten & Baijings, Inga Sempé, and Sebastian Wrong, who now heads up his own offshoot called Wrong for HAY) and emerging (a roster of young design talents including Line Depping, Sylvain Willenz, and Lex Pott). HAY has been available stateside through a select group of e-retailers, and from now through January 2016, shoppers can experience HAY in person at MoMA Design Store's bricks-and-mortar location in New York City.
We spoke with co-founder Mette Hay about the pop-up store >>