T he first thing you notice in the Copenhagen home of designer Thilde Maria Haukohl Kristensen are flowers. They are everywhere, sometimes emerging from corners, sometimes dominating a room, but always present. Thilde’s passion for flowers came from her grandmother, who introduced her to the world of flora.
Now it is her job as well as her passion. “Flowers create joy,” she says. “They connect us to the nature we are a part of and which you can often forget about when you live in the middle of a city.
At home, I use flowers to enhance the atmosphere in each room. They are small emotional enhancers that add their own magic.” Thilde, 43, runs a design studio called Poppykalas and lives with her husband, Jens, 44, and their daughters, Iris and Sonja, aged seven and nine.
Their home is on the top two floors of an old terrace house in the “composers’ quarter” of Østerbro. Thilde likes to arrange flowers without too much greenery in a bowl, rather than in a vase that compresses them and dictates the shape. By using a fakir ring in the bowl, the flowers can stand upright, forming a wild, airy and sculptural shape.
She is inspired by the Japanese ikebana tradition of arranging flowers, where the arrangement is built up in three levels, and always has a spiky layer at the top. Thilde’s other great sources of inspiration are the Swedish visual artist Hilma af Klint , with her spiritual approach to colour schemes and shapes, and Verner Panton, because of his colourful.