Tour Helle Mardahl's quirky Copenhagen home, filled with her own glass creations

Helle Mardahl leans in for a hug as she greets me at the door to her home: a three-storey, semi-detached house built in 1876 and tucked away on a quiet street in Copenhagen’s Østerbro, its brick façade painted baby blue. Her smile is radiant, her blonde hair falls just past her shoulders, and she’s dressed in wide-leg pink Stine Goya trousers and a striped Ralph Lauren shirt. “Come in!” she says, her tone as bright and welcoming as the candy-coloured backdrop.

Behind her, a narrow hallway leads to a staircase where every element – the wall, steps and handrail – is painted in a different pastel hue. Hanging above are two ir- regularly-shaped glass pendants, both her own creations – one green, the other yellow. The interplay of colour and Mardahl’s own warmth create an instant contrast to the grey day outside. The Danish glass designer has called this spot home since she and her partner, British photographer Alastair Philip Wiper, acquired it in 2013. Together, they spent years refurbishing it and making it their own. “It was a completely different space when we moved in,” she says. “It needed some love.”

She leads me from the hallway through a dark golden curtain draped in a semicircle around the doorway to the living room. “I was inspired by the opulence of an old-school bar,” she says, noting that the fabric is repurposed from her central Copenhagen studio. “When I decorate, I want both my- self and my guests to smile when they see what I do with a space – I love bringing an element of surprise.”

The curtain opens to a burst of colour. An eclectic mix of objects fills every corner of the living room. Lilla wooden chairs with red accents sit alongside an Artemide floor lamp in opposing geometric forms designed by Ettore Sottsass from Milan’s influential 1980s design collective Memphis Group. Along one wall, a custom-built couch designed by Mardahl herself features a light pink and mint green veneer base with built-in storage, topped with square cushions arranged in a mosaic of alternating hues. She introduced the design during Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign festival in 2023 as part of The Sensory Society, an installation inspired by Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

In the corner between the couch and the wall, Mardahl’s six-month-old cat, Miso, is curled up, resting beside a bright red lip-shaped pillow. “It’s Dalí’s lips!” says Wiper from the adjacent kitchen. “We got it at his house in Cadaqués, Spain.” Next to the cat, a shelf holds a stack of books, one of Mardahl’s glass lamps in pale orange, and two oval frames – one pink, the other ochre – featuring intricate depictions of flower bouquets. “Life is colour,” Mardahl says simply.

It is this deep appreciation for and bold use of colour – so vividly present in her home – that Mardahl has become known for. Since launching her practice in 2018, she has built an extensive collection of glossy glass creations, defined by her playful approach to form and a candy-hued palette. Each piece is developed in her Copenhagen studio and refined through testing at the Holmegaard glass factory in southern Denmark. “The moment I understood that glass was for me, I built a whole universe around it and went all in,” says Mardahl.

Not that she was always so fascinated by colour. “My aesthetic used to be very different,” she says. After studying fashion at London’s Central Saint Martins, she moved back to Copenhagen, where she launched her own label and opened a store. It was around the same time that fellow fashion designers Henrik Vibskov and Stine Goya were also beginning to make their mark in the industry. “If you look at what I designed back then, everything was black and white,” says Mardahl. “It was another me.”

Perhaps counter-intuitively, her perspective on colour changed during an internship at Maison Margiela in Paris, where she visited the home of the fashion house’s founder, Martin, and found everything coated in white. “It was so conceptual, I loved it,” she says. By the end of the internship, as spring arrived and vibrant flowers bloomed all around her, she began to reconcile her appreciation for a conceptual approach to design and use of colour. “Colour was everywhere,” she says. “It inspired me.”

Her first experiment combining glass and colour came in 2016. She was drawn to the unique qualities of glass and how it could be moulded into different shapes. “It has this inherent fragility which creates a dramatic effect,” she says. She explored the interplay of material and light, designing a round lamp covered in polka dots. The twist: the dots changed colour the moment the lamp was switched on. “It was like I had discovered magic,” she says. This sparked further experimentation and a deeper curiosity about material, leading over the years to the growing collection she now sells worldwide. “What’s beautiful about glass is that it’s so unpredictable – there are so many ways to treat and shape it,” she says. “Every day, I’m still learning something new about the craft, which keeps things ever more exciting.”

She suggests we take a tour of the rest of the house. Entering the kitchen, accessible with a step from the living area, she notes how the house tilted by half a metre in its first years before being permanently fixed in the 1980s. “There are steps everywhere,” she adds with a laugh.

We cross through the kitchen. The space is dotted with her own creations, including shelves lined with glass mugs featuring spherical, coloured handles and small candy-like salt and pepper shakers by the kitchen stove, fitted in an arched nook. Hanging on the wall next to the stove is a cream-coloured satin baguette bag designed by chef Layla Gohar. “We pick up so many objects on our travels,” says Mardahl, pointing to a metal decoration shaped like an upside-down open fan in gold and silver, stemming from a black heart-shaped stone, which they found on a trip to Mexico. “These objects not only bring character to our house but also hold many memories.”

We then enter what is arguably the most impressive room in the house: the conservatory, an all-glass structure that extends from the building into the long and narrow garden behind it. “This is my favourite part,” says Mardahl as she enters.

From the glass ceiling, five round glass pendants in shades of yellow and pink hang at different heights. Below, a long pastel yellow dining table is flanked by matching Arne Jacobsen chairs in light salmon pink. The tabletop features a playful arrangement of Mardahl’s creations: candleholders in pink, blue and yellow with wavy shapes and vary- ing heights, and a stand with a pink base and a pale green disc on top, holding green and yellow heirloom tomatoes. Towards the end, a wide yet narrow aquamarine-hued vase holds bright yellow tulips, just on the verge of blooming.

In a space so rich in colour, one final question comes up: how does she balance it all so seamlessly? Mardahl pauses. “It’s a bit like cooking – if you have a lot of green on your plate, you want to add something else to bring out the flavours,” she says, opening the door to the courtyard and mentioning that in summer the entire glass façade opens, removing any boundary between indoors and out. “It’s about playing with contrast and texture – and, most of all, putting yourself into it.”