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WOUD is a big house placed in Denmark where many designers coming from all over the world are living. The Nordic mood is a certain presence in their projects.
Small traces of innovation and experimentation are contained inside the iconic and essential shapes of their works, or hidden by careful choices of materials and by the soft colours of natural woods.
“Love at the first sight” is the way they use to transform a project into the definitive one.
We came to visit Torben Koed, the exceptional owner of the house, who drove us during the discovering of his Scandinavian world.
When did WOUD born?
It was born last may. It is very young even if I have dealt with design and interior design for long time, but it is a different story.
It started last January when I went to Stockholm, Colonia and some fairs around, with the aim of creating a group of designers as a result of different emergent talents coming from all over the world. So Danish, Finnish, Japanese, Norwegian, German and Canadian designers are now part of the group. While people use to promote already known things, I’d like to promote young people.
Despite of the multi-ethnic team, the stile of their creations is well recognisable, I can say it is very “ Scandinavian”.
Yeah, it is Scandinavian and minimalist, without decorations. This is the representation of elegance for me.
What is elegance, according to you?
As you can see, here everything is extremely natural, without lacquers; we are trying to use pure wood. We don’t like plastic materials and we increased the use of metals.
“Back to nature”: I like simple and functional products. When you observe our works you can see they are essential, iconic, very beautiful, so immediately you fall in love with them; this is the proper meaning of elegance according to me.
It is interesting for me to understand what Danish designers think about IKEA.
Oh, IKEA is amazing and smart, full of exceptional designers and it has very democratic prices. The most of the people can afford IKEA furnitures. I think it is a smart company.
Before being an entrepreneur, were you a designer?
No, I have never been a designer but I love design. What I’m doing is to individuate “good design”. I have been working with designers for many years. I know what is fine or not, I organize briefing, designers show their ideas and we discuss about them. For example if we are talking about this lamp (ndr. Annular) there is nothing more to say: it is in front of you, perfect as it is. When we observe an object like this we don’t have to think a lot about it because we are use to work in this field and we already know what works and what will not. For this reason we only needed a couple of months to create the first prototype. For other projects this phase can last also one year. We started the projects of everything you can see here last May and in January 2015 the first collection was ready. We are only 8 months old, we don’t use to sleep, we use to work.
(Torben laughs)
It is a huge work both of design and production.
Yes, everything is produced in different places. Something in Denmark – because we are a Danish brand – but it is not anymore a competitive country so we use to produce in Vietnam, some things in Taiwan, Poland, Ex Yugoslavia, Russia, everywhere.
We collect objects in warehouses around the world because one of our points of force is that if you like a product, not so much time has to pass before getting it. So if you order an object on Tuesday you will receive it in the weekend.
Of course there is the risk of not completing the object and consequently of being not able to satisfy the request, but it is part of the game!
This morning we received an order from Italy, Venice: what a wonderful city!
Translation by Chiara Sgreccia