by Fred Nicolaus
When writing a profile of someone’s home, it is customary to catalog the things that are in that home. In the case of Niels Strøyer Christopherson, that would miss the point. To be sure, his apartment—a street-level space in Copenhagen’s Østerbro neighborhood—has “stuff” in it. There’s a bed, a table, and a handful of chairs, including some made by his design company, Frama, which he founded in 2011. But Christopherson’s home isn’t about what’s there so much as what isn’t: Its evocative presence emanates instead from a distinct lack of things.
The walls are bare, mottled only by the ghostly remnants of ripped-down wallpaper. The floors are raw wooden planks. The doorways are absent any adornment—including, notably, doors. Give or take a Noguchi bedside lamp, and it has the vibe of a monastery: austere, poetic, and a little bit dramatic.
Like many dramatic things, Christopherson’s home began with a breakup. In the aughts, while working for other home brands and learning the ropes of design, he lived with his then-wife under very different circumstances: an all-white, hypermodern apartment filled with furniture by recognizable names.
When the couple started looking for a new space together, they chanced upon the Østerbro apartment, a former watchmaker’s shop built in 1905. He loved it. She hated it. Soon Christopherson was living there alone. “I saw it as an opportunity for resetting,” he says. “Everything became reversed, like a film negative.” He sold every last stick of the collectible furniture and started over.
Up until that point, Christopherson had dedicated himself to an outward-looking exploration of the world of design. From then on, he went in the other direction. “I started this journey of looking inward, of figuring out what’s inside me,” he says. “What expressions, what emotions, what’s my design language?”
The process started with a seemingly counterintuitive idea: subtraction. The watchmaker’s shop hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, its walls clad in thick brown wallpaper and its floors sealed in glossy varnish and linoleum—so Christopherson stripped it all away.
“I was like, why do I have these doors? I don’t really open and close them, they’re always open,” he says. “When you have a door, it invites you to mentally open and close it. I really believe in this, how it affects our mentality, when something is there or not.”
After stripping away the extraneous, Christopherson found himself content with adding very little. He lived with a makeshift kitchen for years—an upright ladder was used to store dishes—and found he enjoyed the simplicity of it. He never dragged a sofa and flatscreen into the apartment, preferring to shut out the insidious creep of digital media. Little inconveniences of the apartment became opportunities to focus and stay present.
While minimalism often involves meticulous planning and precision, Christopherson was guided by emotion and intuition. When he ripped down the wallpaper, he simply liked the way the plaster markings looked on the wall, so he let them be. On a trip to the countryside, he stumbled across a rusted hulk of metal and, with the addition of a stone slab, it became a bench.
By removing the distractions of decoration, Christopherson has gained the true luxuries of our time: calm, quiet, and undivided attention.
Though the resulting look is austere, it is hardly a void. “I wanted to take all of the stuff out and keep it basic, essential, and simple,” says Christopherson. The ironic result—he describes it as a “comic outcome”—is an extremely potent aesthetic. “That’s why I don’t have any pictures on the walls. It’s expressive enough already.”
While Christopherson was stripping his apartment down, he was also building something up: In 2011, he launched Frama with a handful of pieces at a trade show staged in Berlin’s decommissioned Tempelhof Airport. From the beginning, the brand had a distinct approach: Like Christopherson’s apartment, the products are raw and deliberately simple, executed with as little “design” as possible.
Frama slowly found success, though it didn’t come via a traditional path. Christopherson started with furniture but, for a time, the company was focused on modular kitchen systems. More recently it has added fragrances, lotions, and soaps to the mix; a hybrid shop/cafe in Copenhagen has also opened. Christopherson jokes that the business plan is “like parkour”—jumping from one thing to the next with equal parts grace and peril.
Frama’s rise has coincided with a flowering of the Danish design scene. In recent years, the country’s 3 Days of Design festival has become the buzziest fair on the international circuit, drawing tens of thousands to Copenhagen when the city is joyfully slipping into summer. Heritage brands like Fritz Hansen and House of Finn Juhl show off their tweaked midcentury classics, while relative newcomers like Hay and Muuto host packed parties.
Christopherson’s company is part of that—but a little apart from it too. While many of his contemporaries work in a cheerfully Scandinavian color palette, Frama is all plain wood, untreated metal, and basic shapes. The brand’s premise is a kind of artful retreat from hype, noise, and novelty. It sells simple things for a complicated world.
So it is with Christopherson’s Østerbro home. Though the word “glamorous” is an off fit for the apartment, for the overstimulated and screen-addicted among us, it has a kind of fantasy appeal. By removing the distractions of decoration and even comfort, he has gained the true luxuries of our time: calm, quiet, and undivided attention.
