Copenhagen: Danish Design, Addresses and Institutions

Copenhagen reads like a catalogue: the chairs you have seen in books are sat in here, in the cafés, and the institutions that keep them fit into a single day on foot.

Bredgade, the design street

On Bredgade, the Designmuseum Danmark occupies the former royal Frederik's Hospital, an eighteenth-century building: you move through twentieth-century Danish furniture, Wegner, Juhl, Jacobsen, Kjærholm. The street and its surroundings gather the antique dealers and the "klassik" merchants, top-flight Danish vintage: here you see what the originals cost.

Finn Juhl at Ordrup

To the north, in Ordrup, the house Finn Juhl designed for himself in 1942 is preserved with its furniture, its paintings and its colours, attached to the neighbouring Ordrupgaard museum: the finest lesson in how a Danish designer lived with his own pieces. We devoted an article to Hanne's Bedroom, the room he designed in 1961 and that House of Finn Juhl now reissues.

The SAS Royal and Louisiana

Facing the central station, Arne Jacobsen's SAS Royal Hotel tower, completed in 1960, is the building for which the Egg and Swan chairs were born; now a Radisson, it keeps room 606 in its original state. Further north, in Humlebæk, the Louisiana museum is worth it first for its architecture, that of Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert: low, glazed pavilions linked by galleries that slip through a park above the sea.

Spotted a chair in a Copenhagen café? Scan it on Beyit: designer, maker, value, original or not.