Louise Roe

“I haven’t prepared my answers,” the Danish designer Louise Roe confesses as she sits down to speak with Semaine. “When I prepare too much, I overthink. I like to think intuitively. It’s how I approach most of my work.” This is the sort of thing many people say before revealing they have, in fact, prepared extensively. But Roe appears to mean it. Intuition has always been her governing principle.

From a young age, she recalls feeling acutely aware of how spaces alter a mood. If something in a room feels off, some irrepressible impulse compels her to rearrange it. Since founding her eponymous brand in 2010, Roe has channelled this instinct into a design practice, producing sculptural furniture and objects in glass, ceramic, stone or wood that sit somewhere between early Art Deco, 1930s Brutalism and Bauhaus.

Roe initially studied fashion design, drawn less to clothes themselves than to the idea of perfecting a collection as a complete ecosystem: the materials, silhouettes, colours, and the lives of the people wearing them. “Like a restaurant menu,” she says. “Everything needs to look good, feel good, taste good”. After taking time away from work to have children, she was reluctant to re-enter the snooty world of fashion, preferring instead the calmer orbit of an Italian furniture company. “That was my entry point into this dream world of design,” she says.

In 2018, she opened the Louise Roe Gallery in central Copenhagen, a space combining showroom, offices and The Roe Bar, which serves coffee and a seasonal menu. The result is intentionally tricky to categorise. “Sometimes people come in and ask, ‘What is this place?’ because there’s a lot going on,” Roe says. The café softens the severity that often cling to design spaces: “Design can feel a bit formal,” she admits. Here, people meet, linger and are gently reassured that, yes, they are allowed to sit on the chairs.

“When you’re with loved ones, like family or friends, you’re often gathered around a table,” Roe remarks, “I wanted a similar feeling here”. In her case, the sentiment is also literal. Her husband, Jan, handles the company’s logistics and photography. Her son Emil is the brand manager, while her daughter, the fashionista Sophia Roe, oversees styling and creative direction on shoots. Her two youngest help out at The Roe Bar: “Everyone is involved!”

That spirit of conviviality carries through Roe’s latest collection, inspired by the classic European café. The pieces are architectural yet restrained, designed with communal use in mind. Among the standouts are a chair and table crafted in solid wood that Roe named after Emil’s dog, “Frankie”: “because he’s lively, but also strong” (qualities essential in both furniture and pets). Another piece, “The Person,” is a mouth-blown glass lamp with a friendly silhouette, designed to feel like another companion around the table.

“I’ve always loved cafés,” says Roe. Parisian cafés, naturally, but she has a soft spot for New York’s too, which she describes as “a bit more flashy.” Danish cafés, by contrast, are less polished. “It’s more flip-flops than nice shoes,” she laughs. “Sometimes Denmark can be a bit too relaxed. You have to dream a little bigger.”

Dreaming big came naturally to Roe, growing up in the suburbs of Copenhagen. At home, in her parents’ pared-back 1970s single-storey house, she would rearrange the furniture whenever they were out. Most children asked for toys; Roe begged her mother to let her have the fridge in her bedroom, “because I wanted it to look like a hotel,” she recalls. She also spent long afternoons at her grandparents’ antiques-filled house. “I think the balance between the functionalism of my parents’ home and the decorative nature of my grandparents’ gave me a sparkle.”

Balance, for Roe, is a foundational principle of design. Asked to define it, she pauses before answering. “I think it’s like getting to the top of a mountain. It’s a spot you’ve travelled far to reach, and once you’re there, you feel you’ve completed something.” Another guiding principle is being “daring”: “I always want to create something that has never been seen before”.

In this sense, Roe sees her work as a departure from the more typical Scandinavian aesthetic, often characterised by sober forms and clean lines. This is not necessarily a conscious rebellion. “It’s something that simply comes from within me.”

Looking back at Danish design and architecture, particularly the work of celebrated 50s artists like Arne Jacobsen or Hans J. Wegner, she notes that much of it was focused on functionality above all: “I think it needed a feminine touch!”. For Roe, an overemphasis on practicality or financial logic risks stripping away emotion. “You’re killing all the romance and the love,” she says. “I would rather start with the love. Let’s build something that feels nice for our eyes and emotions, and then we can think, ‘okay, now, how is this chair to sit in?’”.

That sensory quality starts with good materials, which she sources from independent European artisans: “I want people to be able to feel how well my objects are made.” Designing, she continues, is like cooking a good meal: you need quality ingredients. Recently, she has been especially drawn to wood, with its grain, variations and unpredictability. “You never know what will appear before you stain wood,” she says. “You get this unique mélange.”

Roe also delights in pushing materials beyond their expected limits, often using a rigid medium to create organic forms. Take her “Halo” light: a delicate tangle of ceramic tubes that curls around a central glass sphere. Roe was adamant that the tubes had to be ceramic, though at first there was the small matter of stopping the whole thing from collapsing. It took a year for her and her craftsmen to resolve it. “They would come to me saying, ‘I’ve been dreaming of this lamp, maybe we should try this!’” she recalls.

Does she find inspiration in other designers? Roe shrugs: “I don’t really read about a lot of designers. I don’t need them for my work. I feel I have everything in my head.” Still, she names a few who have stayed with her over time, like the 1920s Irish designer Eileen Gray, whose work Roe sees as both very feminine, and graphic in its line. “She was one of the only women working in that very male-dominated sphere at the time”, Roe adds.

Roe also admires the mid-century Italian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa, “for his Brutalistic approach to geometry”. Her own creative process often starts with doodling a simple geometric shape in a notebook. “Like a circle, and then I think, ‘okay, how interesting can this circle be’?” she says.

Some of her best ideas tend to arrive when she’s moving. “I don’t have an atelier where I shut the door and it’s like, ‘Right, design time.’ I design when I’m on the go.” Sometimes, it’s while walking her dog Alice through the forest. Trees help her feel grounded. She even admits she is not entirely above the occasional tree hug. “People are always talking. Trees just stand there. I like that about them”. Plus, the forest gives her the mental space to ‘think big’. “That’s why I prefer high ceilings,” she says. “My head isn’t big enough. I need the extra room above it to fit all the dreams.”

What’s next for the business then, I ask? For one, continuing to prioritise quality over sales: “I’d rather sell less, but make things that last”. It’s a philosophy rooted in a certain resistance to the speed at which the interiors industry now moves, with trends arriving, peaking and collapsing before you have even found the right cushion insert. Roe believes much of this has to do with fast-fashion conglomerates starting homeware lines. H&M Home, for example, has been gaining traction and even appeared at Milan Design Week this year. Roe adds, in passing, that some of these conglomerates have copied her designs (but no biggy: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery).

“IKEA is already producing high volumes of homeware”, she says, “and we really don’t need that much stuff. It won’t last long anyway!”

Other than that, there’s the dream of opening a space abroad. Though any expansion would need to make sense. The same applies to distribution. “A few years ago, we concentrated on entering the US market,” she recalls, “but after the issues with the ‘guy’ over there and his tariffs” (we exchange a knowing look), things got more complicated. For now, she isn’t targeting any specific region. “It’s more about finding the right stores and the right people to work with.”

She did not, of course, have to look far to assemble a top-tier team. In many ways, the family members complete one another. “Jan is not as impulsive as I am,” she says, “which grounds me”. “And my children are like my mentors,” she adds. “We often forget I’m their mum. At work, we’re colleagues, people of passion.” Sophia, she continues, “is a huge tastemaker”. A few years back, both of them collaborated on a collection of handcrafted tableware, with softly glazed ceramics and mouth-blown glass.

That closeness can make things combustible. “There are no filters on emotions,” Roe warns, meaning life at Roe house can occasionally get a little spicy. If someone hates a lampshade, everyone will know before lunch. Still, working as a family remains a privilege. Roe never planned it, but she would not have it any other way.

As we wrap up, she reflects, “I really can’t imagine a life where I grow old and relax. Everything depends on me, so I just have to keep going.” Then, catching herself, she adds, “Or rather, I have to teach the young ones how to do it!”

Article written by Constance Ayrton for Semaine

Photography by Lana Ohrimenko