Why Scandinavian Design Became the Key to One Brooklyn Writer’s Renovation
When I decided last year to embark on gut-renovating a Brooklyn apartment for my growing family, the first thing I thought about was the kitchen. I love to cook, and I love to host, and I wanted something different from the one that had been installed in our current place, of which a very chic friend of mine (French, naturally) once remarked “how American” it looked. There is, of course, no one kind of “American” kitchen, but I took her comment to mean that this one—with its generic Shaker cabinets and their decorative door pulls—looked as though it could have belonged on the set of a 1990s sitcom.
Space in any Brooklyn apartment is precious, and mine is no different. I wanted my new kitchen to be economical and low-fuss but highly practical too. It needed to possess a simple kind of beauty. There should be natural wood, minimal cabinet pulls, and a round table where the family could gather, with a pendant light hanging overhead. But I also required something harder to capture: the spirit of a Scandinavian kitchen (or, as they say in Denmark, køkken)—something beyond specific design choices.
Let me explain something else. I have Danish family. One of my mother’s sisters married a Dane, and I grew up visiting them. In my late 20s, at the end of a particularly ugly breakup, I joined my family in Denmark for the Christmas holiday. It was cold and dark, and the snow fell in pillowy hillocks, rendering roads and sidewalks invisible. The cobblestones glinted in the wet air.
I had been slightly terrified of a winter by myself that year—my first in nearly a decade—and the deep isolation I would feel. But I had a magical time, walking with my sister through the cold streets of Copenhagen, where the city sparkled with holiday lights, and enjoying the quiet and calm of the trees and the lake out in the suburbs where my aunt and her family lived. Their kitchen looked out onto their yard through a row of wide windows, and we ate our meals together at a large table.
There was nothing fancy about the kitchen, with its simple cabinetry so uniform as to almost remain blank in my mind, and yet it is a memory I hold dear, of a moment when our families—so often separated by oceans and continents—were together. I was vulnerable from the breakup, aware that those closest to me had held their breath when I had been in this relationship. It had changed me, in many ways I wasn’t proud of, and this new time together felt like a gift.
Scandinavian design has taken such a hold over the imagination of American interiors that the term is almost meaningless. It is synonymous with a kind of midcentury-modern practicality and coziness—and all of that is true. Much of what is touted about it is its affordability, this notion of democratic design, that you don’t have to be in a Nancy Meyers film to have a gorgeous kitchen, and Ikea, whose products could be found in almost every single home I’ve lived in, exemplifies this. Today, there are newer brands aiming for a much higher level of craftsmanship and thinking more about sustainability, such as the Danish cabinet company Reform, which ultimately helped me with the scheme of my dream kitchen. Reform creates stunning cabinet collections that capture the spartan beauty of Scandinavian design with a more updated sensibility for today. I chose a dark, natural oak with pretty brass knobs that gives the space a sense of polish without feeling overly formal. I can have dinner parties in this kitchen, but I can also feed my two young children a quick meal here after school.
But wait, allow me one digression. Though I have nothing against big kitchens, I’m convinced that those you might see on an episode of Real Housewives (Yolanda’s fridge, anyone?) or in a Kardashian home are inventions of aspirational wealth that will never make us happy. Why have a giant island where you can’t even touch the other side? Do you really need a pantry the size of a bedroom? The kitchen is in many ways the soul of a home, and there is no better example of how it’s done well than the Scandinavian way. The Danish word hygge has entered the American lexicon in the past two decades for understandable reasons. It is often used interchangeably with the word cozy, but it’s more encompassing than that, with roots in the Middle Ages. It’s similar to an Old Norse word that means “protected from the outside world.” Other than our recent experience with the pandemic, we have no concept of burrowing into our homes for the long winter, of making our interiors as warm and inviting as possible to guard against the darkness.
That winter in Denmark, I felt those things: I was safe, full, and in a state of unselfconscious happiness. I hope I can have the same with my kitchen.
Thessaly La Force is a writer living in New York City.
This story originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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