A Note from Our

Creative Director & Founding Partner

Notes are an important part of my creative process. They are a culmination of things: scattered

thoughts, ideas, memories, reflections and observations. They are messy and disjointed,

encapsulating a moment in time.

How do we know when they are meaningless and when they hold the potential to become a

beautiful piece of design? In my work, I use notes in a multitude of ways. Unstructured by nature,

my handwritten scrawls serve as reminders, capturing thoughts on developing designs and

recording new ideas. They are also a form of communication: sketches to brief a designer, key

words and phrases that capture a feeling, or a thought to give us direction and inspiration. Notes,

in all their different forms, reflect what is going on in our brains – fragments that create a whole,

track our thoughts and guide our creative process.

Notes do not have to be words. Working within the field of design, our communication is visual.

Often, an exciting new design begins as a rough sketch on a notepad. And each new page is a

new start and a potential new idea. I have discovered that notes are a universal theme that goes

beyond the design process. They are something we all use – from a greeting scribbled on a post-

it note to a small reminder to a line from a song noted in a phone or a screenshot of a striking

image. I record my notes by hand, but others type theirs into a phone or a computer.

During 3daysofdesign last year, we constructed a house in our Boutique in Copenhagen and

invited people to share what home means to them. A blank canvas and a stack of felt-tip pens

revealed a mass of reflections, several of which left a deep impression on me. Someone wrote

that ‘home is the smell of my child’s room when I open the door in the morning’, another that

‘home is where I can leave the world behind.’ Seeing all the personal interpretations materialise

on one united canvas was a solidification of a premise that we use extensively in our work at ferm

LIVING: the notion of home as more than just bricks and mortar or a collection of objects. Home

is the setting for your life – a place of joy and sadness, holding space for both the extraordinary

and the mundane. We always strive to create products that make you feel at home, with room for

the contrasts in life. In short, a space where you can feel comfortably you.

- Trine Andersen

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