An All-Gray Apartment That’s Not Blah — But Not Hygge Either

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/t-magazine/oliver-gustav-interior-designer-copenhagen.html

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In the paintings of the 19th-century Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi, the color gray achieves a beguiling incandescence. His introspective interiors, which feature the simple, classical architecture of 18th-century Copenhagen apartments bathed in Scandinavia’s soft northern light, present havens of timeless tranquillity. Entering Oliver Gustav’s home is not unlike stepping into one of Hammershoi’s paintings. For one thing, it is in a building quite similar to Strandgade 30, where the painter and his wife lived for 10 years, and which served as a setting for his most important works. But it’s also the stillness and the way the light softens the sharp angles of each room.

Gustav is best known for his stores in New York and Copenhagen, where he shows the work of contemporary designers — Vincenzo De Cotiis, Rick Owens, Faye Toogood and Michael Verheyden among others — alongside 17th-century antiques and his own line of furniture. But it is here, in the Copenhagen apartment he shares with his partner, that his vision is fully expressed. The first thing you notice is the dramatic slant of the floor. “I always fall in love with crooked places,” the 38-year-old designer says. Foundations of buildings such as his are oak, he explains, which tend to shift over the course of hundreds of years. The structure, built in 1734, is listed by the government as a building of architectural significance. Danes take their historical preservation seriously; there is virtually nothing you can change about a listed building — not the sloping floors, not the tiny kitchen, not the placement of outlets or switches, nor the moldings or windows. Adjacent to the entrance of Gustav’s apartment, for example, is what appears to be a shower door to the only “bathroom” in the 2,000-square-foot apartment. It is, in fact, no bigger than a shower stall, with a toilet and sink wedged into corners and a drain in the center of the floor. “It’s wonderful to step back in time,” Gustav says with a smile, “but it’s not necessarily very practical.”

Yet were it not for these restrictions, the bones of the apartment would have been lost long ago, as would have the unsealed pine floors, colored a warm light gray that is often imitated with bleaches and stains but is naturally achieved with the passage of time. Gustav painted the walls in a matte mineral paint from Germany that highlights the subtle texture of the old plaster. Many of the original windowpanes, too, remain intact, and the wavy glass helps to diffuse the spare winter light, such a precious commodity for Danes. “It is not the cold that makes the winters so long here,” explains Gustav’s partner, “but the darkness.”

To this historically correct backdrop Gustav has added deep sofas and chairs covered in heavy linens as well as 18th-century antiques, providing a stately backdrop for the edgier art and objects scattered throughout. “I fall in love with textures and materials — things that are heavy and raw,” he says. Pieces like a large aluminum disk lamp by Kevin Josias, oxidized to a soft silver, manage to both blend into the elegant interior and provide a note that feels slightly at odds with it. “I always need something that irritates the eye,” Gustav says, though irritation is not quite right: The result is more quietly subversive. He says his grandfather, a blacksmith who “had a beautiful sense of nothing,” influenced his sensibility. But Gustav’s rooms, though spare, are hardly minimalist.

“People have described my work as dunkel” — which translates to “dark” or “murky” — “but I think it’s more playful,” says Gustav, whose sparkling blue eyes and broad smile are warm and welcoming — more hyggeligt, you could say, the Danish word for “cozy” that has recently gained traction in the rest of the world. The apartment lies somewhere in between, an exchange spanning traditional elements, like the white 19th-century ceramic stove in the corner of the living room, and the sometimes melancholy pieces of contemporary art. In the dining room a work by Louise Bourgeois reads, “They did this, they did that, my stomach aches, my head aches, my feet hurt, a wounded Lion.”

“Danes have been called the happiest people,” Gustav says. “I wonder how they measure this.” His own story is indicative of the more complex realities of growing up in this country. His parents moved their family from Copenhagen to a small town when Gustav was a boy. The place, rural and conservative, was oppressive to him and he moved back to the city as soon as he could. At 17, he was studying business and living in a small studio apartment his parents had purchased for him. One day he arrived home to find the locks had been changed. Gustav assumed they had finally discovered that he was gay. He has not spoken to them since.

The resilient teenager, forced to drop out of school, immediately found a job with the creative director of a department store in Copenhagen that sold classic furniture by midcentury modern designers — Poul Kjaerholm, Hans Wegner, Arne Jacobsen and the like. This led to a job with Tage Andersen, a furniture-maker and set designer with a magnificent silver beard known for his fantastic floral arrangements and otherworldly store in the center of town. Gustav remains indebted to his former employer, a champion of singular vision who inspired his own strict work ethic. “Tage works from 5 in the morning to 10 at night,” says Gustav, who parted company with Andersen after six years.

In 2009, Gustav rented a charming three-story carriage house where he lived and worked. The house was lacking in modern conveniences — he had to hang rugs over the windows to survive the winter — but it became a sort of calling card for his design. The owner of Day Birger et Mikkelsen, one of the country’s largest fashion houses, saw the place in a magazine and hired him to create a visual identity for her company. Gustav began building elaborate sets for events — he recreated “The Nutcracker” at the French Embassy and an apple orchard in an old warehouse for Louis Vuitton. His interior design business flourished as well. He collected art, often paying things off over a number of years. In 2012, he left the carriage house for another listed home (this time with heat) and opened his shop in the 18th-century neighborhood of Frederiksstaden, where it still stands.

“I have a love affair with things,” says Gustav, who regularly visits auction houses in Germany and flea markets in France and Denmark, filling his stores with his finds. The trouble is parting with them: “I only buy those things that I want for myself.” Often, he is so attached to a piece that he can’t bring himself to part with it, to the point where people started joking that nothing in his Copenhagen store was for sale. He laughs at this, but also notes that he doesn’t have a need for money. “I just want a beautiful life.”

On my last day in Copenhagen, Gustav drove me to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside the city, to see a Louise Bourgeois exhibition. In her powerful sculptures and installations, the artist often explored her complex, sometimes troubled relationships. “I totally understand her world,” Gustav told me. “She is completely true to herself.” I can see why he admires Bourgeois’s work: His own vision is as steadfast and true, and with his equally evocative interiors he’s found a way of processing his own life. “My way of expressing myself is to build my own universe,” and in doing so, he added, “I create my own self.”