We can see Copenhagen harbour from every room of designer Anton Hendrik Denys’s home, a terraced house perched on a pier in the formerly industrial neighbourhood of Sydhavn. And if the views of waterfront towers, house boats and waterfowl weren’t alluring enough, the water is consistently crystal-clear, an open invitation to pick up an oar or simply take a refreshing dip. It’s easy to see why Denys and his partner, political consultant Søren Høfler, were immediately drawn to the property when they first saw it on an unseasonably warm day in October 2020. Back then, the couple had just begun to entertain the idea of buying a home together. Denys signed them up for a handful of viewings as a fun weekend activity, and this was the first place they saw. It was love at first sight.
Completed in 2020, the building – by local practices Aarstiderne Arkitekter and Holscher Nordberg – alludes to its geographical context beautifully. Its wooden cladding appears to extend from the vertical slats that line the pier, and the saltbox roofs punctuating the individual terraces bring to mind billowing sails. The distinctive yet unpretentious exterior is a fine example of contemporary Danish residential architecture. But more than inspiring views and handsome façades, it’s the interiors that serve as the home’s main draw, reflecting Denys’s bold experiments with colour and material.
‘I’m very minimalist when it comes to my form language, but I like to be maximalist in my usage of colours and materials,’ explains the 33-year-old Denys, who hails from Antwerp, studied at Design Academy Eindhoven and moved to Denmark in 2020 just before the Covid pandemic. His penchant for colour co-ordination is immediately evident as we enter the kitchen and dining room area, which looks over the back terrace right above the water. The space is saturated in yellow, as though in homage to Olafur Eliasson’s Room for One Colour. Bright-yellow polyester curtains with a mesh-like weave, from Kvadrat’s ‘Aerio’ collection, make the most of the full-height windows. Glazed wall tiles from Danish brand File Under Pop, in ochre and amber, offset the black kitchen cabinets and white countertops specified by the architects, while the faucet, by Arne Jacobsen for Vola, is in safety yellow. At the centre of the dining area, surrounded by rosewood-veneered chairs (also by Jacobsen), is a vintage table with a buttery yellow tabletop. Likewise, yellow is the dominant colour in the single painting in this space, created by Høfler’s mother.
A similar logic pervades the rest of the home. Though the walls have been left in the original white, the combination of ‘Aerio’ curtains and boldly hued furnishings give each space its singular colourful identity. The first-floor living room is forest green, a perfect complement to Høfler’s extensive collection of leafy plants, while the sapphire blue of the second-floor main bedroom accentuates our impression of being on the water. Meanwhile the first-floor study is lined with crimson curtains that give the space an otherworldly glow when it is awash with sunlight in the mornings. At other times it is illuminated by Verner Panton’s ‘VP Globe’ pendant, which has a vivid splash of red on the interior shades. A dark red rug and a Kurt Trampedach painting with a maroon-coloured mount helps tie the whole thing together.
Furnishings are a mix of Denys’s own creations and vintage finds: back in 2012, while he was still a student at Design Academy, Denys created a modular outdoor seating collection in polyurethane foam. Belgian furniture brand Quinze & Milan made the prototype, and proceeded to produce the collection for a few years. A version of this seating, upholstered in green ‘Vidar’ fabric from Kvadrat, serves as the sofa in the living room, while another version, in recycled foam with a transparent coating, sits on the roof terrace. Elsewhere we see a divider and a wall hanging made of interlacing strips of foam, with a glossy rubber coating that makes the material look heavier than it really is: ‘I love to give people the illusion that this is actually ceramic,’ Denys says. It is precisely this material that characterises the custom chandelier in the dining room, sandwiching a trio of downward light sources clad in metallic tubes.
The ‘Foam Fences’ collection was one of Denys’s two graduation projects at Design Academy, since expanded into various typologies. The other was his stainless-steel ‘Self Reflect’ collection, inspired by Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus leaning over a pond to gaze at his reflection, and now sold through Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Denys created a series of mirrors, stools and lamps with surface treatments that result in distinctive colours and varying degrees of reflectiveness, encouraging the user to observe themselves in their everyday lives. Prototypes and artist’s proofs of the ‘Self Reflect’ pieces pop up throughout the home, including a circular mirror anchoring the living room and a monolithic bench at the end of Denys and Høfler’s bed. They are impressive at any time of the day, but truly come to life at dawn and dusk when sunbeams bounce off their undulating surfaces to create a dance of light on the walls and ceiling: a miniature aurora borealis.
A side table in azure blue resin, by fellow Design Academy alumna Sabine Marcelis, stands in the bedroom; custom screens by another, Fransje Gimbrere, cover up the home’s various technical closets; and a contemporary rug by Danish/Swedish duo All the Way to Paris lies on the floor of the living room, but aside from that, the bulk of the furniture is mid-20th-century. Much of this had belonged to Denys’s maternal grandparents, Anne Geens and Antoon Vanderschueren, who had a house in the village of Herentals (half an hour outside Antwerp) designed by Lou Jansen, one of Belgium’s foremost Modernist architects.
‘My grandmother was a pharmacist by education, but if she had been born a few generations later, she would probably have been an architect or designer. She had an amazing aesthetic sense, and passed on her interest in design and architecture to me,’ Denys recalls.
For many years, Denys had imagined himself inheriting his grandparents’ house, and promised that he would keep all their furniture in place. The move to Copenhagen put a dent in these plans, but he has held on to a few pieces to evoke fond memories of his grandmother. Among them are a pair of Poul Kjærholm nesting tables, a chaise-longue by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, and a George Nelson desk that Denys’s mother used as a child. Now seamlessly integrated into Denys and Høfler’s home, these pieces have patinas and gentle scratches that attest to decades of affectionate use, and a lifelong love of design that happily lives on in Geens’s grandson.
