Down-Home in Denmark: Designer Rose Hermansen’s Copenhagen Family Apartment

This week we’re revisiting our favorite stories from 2024, like this one:

If Rose Hermansen looks familiar, that might be because she’s been a model for 17 years now. “Crazy!” says the 30 year old. In Copenhagen, where she lives, Rose is even better known these days as as a designer specializing in interiors and furniture. She’s one half of Atelier Axo, the firm she and architect Caroline Sillesen, a childhood friend, established in 2019.

We recently featured Restaurant Bobe, the composed Copenhagen hotspot designed by the duo. Today, we’re dropping in on Rose at home in the 958-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment she shares with her partner, Loke Rahbek, a musician and graphic designer, and their toddler, Jakob. Eager to trade up from their rental, Rose found their place via some blurry photos: “we were both self-employed and I had a new company, so we looked online at cheap co-op apartments. This one had a tiny kitchen, no bath, and dark floors, but I could see it had good spatial qualities and wonderful light. We planned a meeting and quickly bought it.”

That was before Jakob was born, and Rose and Loke embarked on, in her words, “a huge renovation on a very tight budget: we tore down a wall, lifted up old floor tiles, removed wallpaper, planed the floors, and built a shower.” They did the work themselves with help from family and friends, whitewashed the walls, and staged picnics on their shored up living room floor. Here are the results.

Photographs by and courtesy of Rasmus Weng Karlsen (@rasmuswengkarlesn) for Sixtysix, unless noted.

Follow Atelier Axo @atelieraxo.

More creatives at home:

• Urban Indoor-Outdoor Living: A Young Couple’s Redesign of a Row House in Ghent
• Self-Design and Build: Izat Arundell’s Stone House in Scotland (for Rent This Summer)
• The Soot House: Conjuring the Ghosts of Old New England on Spruce Head in Maine

N.B.: This story originally ran on July 8, 2024 and has been updated.