I remember a time when we chowed down those flaky, fruit-filled pastries every morning with a cup of mountain grown coffee. (Yep, I’m old enough to remember Mrs. Olson!). But now, we furniture fiends crave an even tastier kind of Danish, the vintage wood furniture produced after World War Two. I’ll take tubular steel over blueberry and cheese filling any day!
Why do we dig Danish? Masters like Jacobsen, Wegner and Panton (to name just a few) harmonized the beauty of form with the functions of sitting, eating and lounging. Many of us are drawn to simplicity and clean lines, and this is why Danish furniture endures. It offers a respite from our cluttered and complicated world.
Unfortunately, Danish fabric doesn’t endure as well as the furnture. A company called Lotus Bleu, run by designer Jeannie Fraise performs masterful facelifts on Bauhaus sofas, lounge chairs and ottomans, often recovering the tired pieces with vivid contemporary fabric from the French house of Robert Le Heros. Still an investment, the reborn vintage pieces range in price from around $750 to $1500. The pieces, like the daybed below, seem to fly out of her San Francisco shop as fast as she reupholsters them. Visit her site now to see why.
Fraise’s background as an art student and then curator at the Whitney and Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art helped shaped her designerly eye. Her mid-century classics infused with crisp, modern textiles, maintain the Danish art of understatement while giving a boost to seating arrangements. The chic Parisian prints mix beautifully with other patterns, as witnessed in the some 30 projects Fraise completed this year.