Anyone who has done the rounds of a design fair knows the particular fatigue of it: the standing, the small talk conducted at volume, the slow realisation that you have looked at four hundred chairs and can no longer recall a single one.
The good locations are the ones that let you sit down. At this year’s 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, DCW éditions opened their showroom on Dronningens Tværgade, and did something quietly radical. They made a room you actually wanted to stay in.
We were happily among them, hosting both new and familiar faces through the ranges across the three days. The showroom was shared with the furniture house Mazo and DCW’s sister brand Modelec under the title Rooted in Time, and the conceit was simple: place pieces from different decades in the same room, not for contrast but to reveal the through-line. Heritage, the argument went, isn’t so much inherited as chosen. It was also the setting for the unveiling of DCW’s newest piece, the In Fine.
Author
Owen Wray
Founder Sirus Concepts
Editors Picks
On the occasion of 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen, DCW éditions, their sister brand Modelec, and Mazo Design, the Danish furniture brand, came together for a shared exhibition, « Rooted in Time, » at Dronningegården. Pictures © Mary Fotinaki / M21 STUDIO
The name is the giveaway. In fine, Latin for “in the end.” And an end of sorts it is: the In Fine closes a lineage that opened with In the Tube and evolved through In the Tube 360, a series arriving, at last, where its Latin name always promised. The lamp itself comes as both a wall light and a tall pendant, casting a warm 2700K light that does the unfashionable but useful thing of flattering a room rather than interrogating it. For specifiers, the appeal is range: one quiet, considered language that runs from a sconce in a hallway to a long line over a kitchen island, in a palette that includes a rather good red for those willing to commit.
The craft sits where it always does with DCW. Since 2008 the French design house has built its reputation on objects with roots in the past and an eye on the future; the house that reissued Bernard-Albin Gras’s 1921 Lampe Gras and never quite stopped thinking about permanence. Their motto, do not live in the dark, reads as a joke until you notice they mean it. The In Fine belongs to that lineage: not a novelty, but something built to still make sense in twenty years.
DCW éditions unveils the IN FINE collection, a stroke of elegance as a signature, crowning the natural evolution of the tube by Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost and Dominique Perrault. Pictures © Mary Fotinaki / M21 STUDIO
For the Nordic market, where the relationship with darkness is less a slogan than a six-month fact of life, a lamp designed for the long view feels about right. Choose well, and choose once.
