Poul Madsen, owner of Normann Copenhagen, talks Scandinavian design

When Poul Madsen and his business partner, Jan Andersen, decided to merge their businesses together in 1999 (a glass importer and design company, respectively), they certainly didn’t expect the brand to grow into the household name it is today. Normann Copenhagen opened The Nordic Room by Homeless in Hong Kong – a store featuring carefully curated Scandinavian design pieces – followed by its flagship store in Shanghai. We caught up with Madsen when he was last in town.

Normann Copenhagen’s flagship store in Shanghai

Scandinavian design is everywhere. It’s everything about Scandinavian living and the way we do things. We know that this trend won’t go on forever, but it’s really amazing to see not only Danish design, but also Danish fashion and film becoming quite successful. Recently, there have been a lot of top chefs from Copenhagen moving to New York and starting up restaurants. I think if you have to point at one project that started everything, it’d be Noma – the restaurant was an eye-opener in a lot of ways. I think right after the financial crisis a lot of people needed to step back a little bit and keep things simple, pure and clean. That’s very much what Nordic living is about.

We didn’t at any point picture coming this far. When we started, it was just me and my partner, Jan. We both had our own small companies at that time and merged the two into Normann Copenhagen. We didn’t have any huge goals. We just wanted to have fun with our working life. I love design and I love to work with the industry. I think we’re very gifted in that it’s possible for us to do that.

We did our Daily Fiction collection together with a fashion agency called Femmes Regionales. Our business is very often inspired by the fashion world. If you look at some of the major fashion brands at the moment, there are a lot of big patterns and flowers in crazy colours – it’s almost like somebody dropped a lot of paint. I think we can learn from that. A chair or sofa changes its character 100 per cent if you go from a single colour to something more powerful, colourful and patterned.

Our design is very easy to understand and decode. The products need to be able to tell their own story. If you look at our products, what you see is what you get, pretty much. We don’t try to add extra details and features that don’t make sense.

The time is right to do more experimental things. We still want to be a product that is easy and that a wide range of people can approach, but we still want to do something surprising and a little bit crazy sometimes.