For a festival long characterized by its intimacy and human scale, 3daysofdesign is sitting at a critical inflection point. The 2026 edition boasted a whopping 572 exhibitions (and nearly 900 events) across the city of Copenhagen, up from roughly 600 events in 2025. With the fair’s scope rapidly expanding, attracting lifestyle brands as well as the traditional design players, the challenge for visitors, as in Milan, will be to discern hype from substance — to find the magic moments within the jam-packed program. The question for the organizers remains whether to double down on growth or rein it in to retain the authenticity that made the program successful in the first place.
Unlike Milan, however, 3daysofdesign wasn’t defined by marquee launches. (more on those later) or otherwise embraced a quieter, more subdued design language. It would be tempting to write this trend off as a recession indicator — a signal that brands are becoming more risk-averse, opting instead for safer, more functional and commercially legible designs. But, in many ways, this deliberate choice to step off the hamster wheel of endless product launches reflects the thoughtfulness that has always grounded the Scandinavian design scene, rooted in comfort, longevity and adaptability, rather than novelty for novelty’s sake.
All this made it clear that 3daysofdesign is an event more geared towards connection than commerce. Across the city, there were little moments of pause amid the chaos. At Tarkett, for instance, I stumbled upon a morning meditation session underway in the colourful, carpet-clad room designed by Yinka Ilori (part of a larger exhibition on circularity that platformed designers reimagining banal surfacing materials in innovative ways). In a less outwardly wellness-driven way, other brands took a sensory approach to mindfulness. Fritz Hansen teamed up with Japanese audio brand Technics to create a listening room within its flagship store; Frama’s exhibition featured scent sculptures that gave aroma a spatial form; and Bankston installed their hardware collections in unconventional applications as part of their manifesto on touch, in collaboration with FOR SCALE.
Hospitality appeared to be the theme du jour: Karimoku Case and Dynaudio served matcha in ceremonial fashion in the basement of their new Norm Architects-designed space; Louise Roe expanded her gallery café concept, The Roe Bar; and tableware brand Service Projects popped up in an Island Brygge café to give visitors a chance to experience their products in use. The festival itself was also quick to capitalize on a growing appetite for design-inflected hospitality experiences, debuting a series of ticketed dinners hosted in different neighbourhoods throughout the week.
What was perhaps most refreshing about this year’s edition of 3daysofdesign was its resistance to overintellectualize design in favour of activations that foregrounded play. Georg Jensen, for its part, launched a collection of games and small objects in its signature silver. To celebrate, the brand hosted lawn games on a patch of turf in the city centre.
Vipp’s installation was another that appealed to one’s inner child, awash in a joyful yellow hue that almost made me forget the absence of Danish sunshine on an unseasonably cool and rainy week in June. Here, Barcelona firm Mesura staged a massive swimming pool-like conversation pit, formed from components of the brand’s modular sofa system — where babies crawled, children frolicked, and adult festivalgoers got their obligatory Instagram photo-op. A seesaw and lifeguard chair, both outfitted with Vipp Swivel seats, added to the vignette’s cheeky charm.
Independent exhibition also offered moments of reprieve. Already more than 20,000 steps into my day, I was grateful to kick my feet up on an installation by Nike and Naked Space, floating nearly weightless on its undulating inflatable surface. Around the corner, Oatly served coffee and cocktails out of literal holes punched in the wall, eliciting smiles from weary visitors.
The whole affair was a reminder that design need not take itself so seriously — a lesson Muuto also seems to have taken to heart. The local brand marked its 20th anniversary with the limited-edition Close to Heart chair, designed by Spacon. The design riffs on the heart motif without crossing into cliché, highlighting its unique geometry of sharp angles and double curves through extruded aluminum forms. For Muuto, this milestone was not about looking back, as many legacy brands tend to do, but rather looking forward to what the future of Scandinavian design might hold.
Muuto wasn’t the only one celebrating a big birthday. Verner Panton would have turned 100 this year, and many brands seized the moment to revisit some of his iconic designs: Karakter x Cassina reiussed the Peacock Chair; Montana revived the Panton Wire table; Vitra debuted new colours in the Heart Cone Chair and the Living Tower; and &Tradition, perhaps most successfully, gave the Flowerpot pendant a new twist with a stripped-down, lacquerless sculpture, based on previously unpublished archival sketches.
Over at Fredericia, the Trisse collection of tables by Nanna Ditzel, originally designed in response to a brief for children’s furniture, was brought back to life at full size and displayed alongside a thoughtful presentation of Danish design heritage, ported over from an exhibition at the Triennale di Milano. Taking the exhibition out of a museum context and into a showroom gave it an accessible appeal, turning it into a cabinet of curiosities to explore (drawers beneath the displays pulled out to reveal archival materials, including Ditzel’s ruler, marked with her name). Iitala, meanwhile, scaled up the Aalto vase into a nearly 7-metre-high aluminum pavilion on the harbourfront, allowing visitors to experience the familiar object from a new perspective.
Among the Scandi mainstays, there were also a growing number of international brands looking to crack the European market. Vancouver-based lighting brand A-N-D put down more permanent roots in the city with the opening of its new flagship showroom. Australian brand NAU also bolstered its presence in Copenhagen, setting up shop in The Social House for the next 12 months to create “an ongoing destination for contemporary Australian design in Europe.” And at Portrait of Korean Living, by Swiss creative studio Gini Moynier, a trio of brands emphasized both the cultural and aesthetic intersections of east and west: Rareraw presented a series of seriously Dieter Rams-coded modular furnishings, ILKW showed its adorable SNOWMAN family of lights, and Flat Point emerged as Korea’s answer to USM.
Perhaps more than most fairs, Copenhagen Design Week seems primed to showcase the “little guy.” This was as true of the big showrooms — Vitra, for example, tapped the emerging Berlin-based firm Studio Œ to design this year’s hero launch, the Bascule Lounge Chair — as it was at the many group shows throughout the city. , for its part, is dedicated entirely to industry newcomers exploring “experimental approaches to craft, material and tradition.” The global roster of exhibitors ranged from Montreal’s Atelier Fomenta, who was showing the rubber tables that first caught our eye at DesignTO, to Brazilian Danish duo Russo Betak, whose stunning light fixtures are 3D-printed using shells sourced from the seafood industry in Normandy.
New creators also featured heavily at , a new show set within a raw commercial space on Paper Island. Here, many of the pieces focused on repurposing offcuts or undesirable materials. Studio Daae’s brilliant room divider gave horizontal blinds a new lease on life, while p(erson)al’s light-as-air work chair elicited audible gasps when passersby realized it was made of industrial polyurethane tubes, and not glass. There were no overt proclamations of sustainability, despite many pieces being almost archetypically so — hopefully, a sign that conscious design is becoming so normalized it no longer needs to be called out as a selling point.
What was most heartening was that many exhibitions saw the works of emerging designers and their established counterparts shown in dialogue with each other, reflecting a spirit of camaraderie over competition. At , a group show curated by Edmontonian expat Persia McKinney-Duncan, which asked designers to riff on a singular typology, the coat rack, heavyweights like Jamie Wolfond showed alongside early career designers like Royal Danish Academy graduate Mette Korte, whose iteration drew on the familiar forms of chopsticks. At , a similar concept that asks designers to use a single tool (in this year’s case, the sewing machine), you were as likely to stumble upon a lighting collection by Foster + Partners as you were a hammock made from sails by local designer Sia Hurtigkarl. In this way, 3daysofdesign carved out an essential space for exchange between generations — not a proverbial passing of the torch, but a shared investment in where design is headed next.
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