Recommended: Louise Wahlgreen and Tiden & Tingen on Sankt Hans Gade in Copenhagen.
I’m a guidebook guy. I sort of wish I weren’t, but I am. When I travel, I tend to consult Lonely Planet, TimeOut, Wallpaper, Supercities, Unlike and various other dead-tree and electronic sources to determine which shops, bars, restaurants and sights I’d like to visit; list in hand, I then locate everything via Google and mark out P.O.I.’s on some sort of paper map (Moleskine CitiGuides do the trick). The point isn’t to set an intinerary in stone, but rather to have some sort of reference when roaming: oh, right, there’s supposed to be a great beer bar around the corner here; why don’t we stop in?
That said, my meticulousness can suck the spontaneity out of traveling. Which is why the Louise Wahl-Green and Tiden & Tingen shop in Copenhagen was such a revelation. We found it thirdhand: en route to Retrograd, a terrific midcentury knickknacks store recommended by Wallpaper, we stumbled upon the equally excellent Kierkegaard Books, picked up some old copies of Esquire and Mobilia and were kindly pointed by the proprieter in the direction of Ravnsborggade, on the other side of town, for more secondhand scrounging. When we arrived, however, the store I’d marked in my Moleskine—Ole Madsen—was closed. Luckily LWG and T&T was right around the corner, the facade wallpapered with eye-catching black-and-white fliers.
The pictures speak for themselves, I think. The shop featured a well-edited selection of home furnishings (Danish Modern coffee table, midcentury office chairs, giant schoolhouse chalkboard, jukebox); tasteful flea market bric-a-brac (rotary telephones, mod salt shakers, orange alarm clocks, a vintage Bodum Santos vaccum coffee maker); and Ms. Wahlgreen’s own elegant handmade women’s clothing.
A 1999 graduate of Danmarks Design Skole who’s released four collections since launching her line in 2004, Louise was happy to show us the vintage industrial machines that play a vital role in her development process—and to just hang out, chatting, for a half-hour or so. She couldn’t have been nicer.
As for the reasonably priced little shop itself, a perfect blend of clutter and care, hip and homey, casual and curated… it’s apparently brand-new. They’d just had their launch party the night before. Which means you can’t find it in any guidebooks, online or otherwise. Yet.
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