Crafty, nimble, good with your hands – there’s no direct translation for the Danish expression “ferm”, but these approximations conjure up the flavour of it. To get a further sense of the true meaning, you only have to look around the family home of Trine Andersen, founder of cool Scandinavian interiors company Ferm Living. Trine, husband Martin, and son August, two, moved from Aarhus in Jutland to their apartment in the trendy Islands Brygge area of Copenhagen just a year ago. In the past decade, the district has been transformed from a rundown harbourside into one of the city’s most happening neighbourhoods, popular with young families. Trine’s apartment is on the first floor of a converted pencil factory, a mixed development, with studio and office spaces, as well as private dwellings. It’s the ideal set-up, with the Ferm Living office just next door.
There’s certainly no mistaking the apartment’s past life as a warehouse, with its high ceilings, tall windows and absolutely mammoth-sized rooms – at 100 square metres, the living room-cum-dining room has space to swing a elephant, never mind the proverbial cat. The walls are painted stark white, magnifying that glorious feeling of spaciousness, with light streaming in through the tall, vacant windows. “We deliberately chose not put up curtains or blinds,” says Trine. “That would make it too soft and we wanted to keep the industrial feel. Plus, we aren’t overlooked by any neighbours so it’s still private.”
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