Tina Seidenfaden Busck’s anti-Scandi manifesto

The drive to Danish gallery owner Tina Seidenfaden Busck’s home in Taarbæk, a quaint former fishing village 20 minutes north of Copenhagen, takes you on a whistlestop tour through some of Arne Jacobsen’s most iconic modernist landmarks. There’s the Bellevue Theatre; the Lego-like Bellavista housing estate; a futuristic-looking petrol station with a mushroom-shaped concrete awning: sleek, geometric buildings that have set the tone for much of contemporary Danish design.

Yet entering Busck’s maximalist 19th-century cottage jolts you into another design world – one where juxtaposing prints and textures happily commingle, and colourful walls are clustered with artworks, vintage tapestries and one-of-a-kind objets sourced from her travels. “I’m very much inspired by homes where you can tell who lives there,” she says. Wearing an embroidered red-and-white striped Mexican kaftan and Venetian slippers, her fingers and wrists adorned with boho-style gold jewellery, Busck is welcoming, radiating a relaxed and unpretentious charm. “Whether it’s to my taste or not, I like when a home tells the story of the people.”

Busck’s eclectic, lived-in interiors style will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with The Apartment, the Copenhagen design gallery and showroom she founded in 2011 in the 18th-century townhouse in Christianshavn where she and her family previously resided. Curated to feel like a private residence, it was one of the first to pioneer the much-copied “shop the home” retail concept where everything from the rugs to the lighting and the crockery are for sale, and has become renowned among design aficionados and vintage lovers for its revolving edit of antiques and artisanal pieces. Here, handwoven 1950s rugs by the Swedish textile artist Märta Måås-Fjetterström (POA) and 19th-century American patchwork quilts (from €1,642) are sold alongside Kalmar Werkstätten’s brass lamps (from €1,889), handpainted glassware by Viennese maker J & L Lobmeyr (€821) and Portuguese ceramic hanging platters (€2,463).

The edit is filtered through Busck’s exacting eye, trained at Sotheby’s, where she worked for more than 10 years, followed by Andersen’s Contemporary in Copenhagen, where she represented artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Tomás Saraceno. 

“I love to travel and search for new artists and crafts, whether it’s Greek textiles or folk art,” she says. Realising that she didn’t want to be a traditional gallerist (“looking after artists was quite demanding,” she admits), she began advising private clients on buying art and furniture, and came up with the idea for a hybrid gallery where she could bring her moodboards to life.

“The main design galleries in Denmark were very much focusing on Danish modern [design], and I realised that a lot of the pieces I was suggesting were things you couldn’t find in Copenhagen,” says Busck, who has exhibited international designers and makers such as Ilse Crawford, McCollin Bryan and Michael Anastassiades alongside handpicked vintage treasures from her globetrotting expeditions. “I think what defines The Apartment is that it’s not specialised in anything,” says Busck. “It’s really about craftsmanship.”

Among the roster of artisans Busck currently represents at the gallery-store is the American editor-turned-maker Deborah Needleman, who has been weaving baskets from willow and rush at her upstate New York studio since 2018. “I love that while Tina’s eye is deeply educated and sophisticated, she chooses to deploy it to create spaces that are simple and fresh, and full of the vitality that comes from handcrafted objects, rather than using it to make rooms that are pretentious or beholden to provenance,” says Needleman. “Of course, she is well-versed in the history of design, art and the decorative arts, but she uses her connoisseurship to lavish attention on objects that speak to her, and which often have a naive beauty and a reverence for nature.”

Busck and her husband Mathias, a property developer, moved into the two-storey house, believed originally to have been built as a summer residence for an heiress of the Carlsberg brewery, with their three children in 2019 and lived in it for almost four years before embarking on a year-long restoration. “The house had a really nice, cosy atmosphere but it consisted of many small rooms, some of which we never used,” says Busck, who moved the entrance, installed a new mustard-yellow timber staircase and converted three small rooms into an open-plan kitchen with brushed-steel worktops, an antique Delft tile splashback behind the hob and interior windows.

“Mathias and I complemented each other really well because he’s into all those details like Bakelite switches and glass partition walls, whereas I’m already thinking about the wallpaper and the textiles,” laughs Busck. Her penchant for chintz and tactile furnishings is apparent at every turn, from the cosy reading nook piled high with cushions in Carolina Irving’s vibrant textiles to the pointillist-like sitting room with its custard-and-green botanical print wallpaper and candy-striped sofa. “When we lived in Christianshavn, most of the walls were painted, so here I just couldn’t stop myself,” says Busck of her weakness for wallpaper, which lines numerous walls of the house. “I love the tactility of it and how old-fashioned it is. I just think it decorates a room in a different way.”

Art is a clear passion, with her tastes skewing towards kaleidoscopic prints and abstract, textural works. In the kitchen, a prismatic light piece by Olafur Eliasson and a sculpture of colourful crayons encased in Plexiglas by Arman sit alongside vintage ceramic hanging platters and framed tapestries by Märta Måås-Fjetterström, while one of Isabella Ducrot’s hand-stitched paper collages adorns the sitting-room wall. “I’m really fascinated by her,” says Busck of the 93-year-old Rome-based artist. “It was only in her 50s that she started to focus on her art and find her voice and stop caring about how people saw her, and now she’s doing major solo exhibitions and writing books.”

She attributes her love of art and collecting to her father, who would take her to museums and auction houses as a child growing up in Copenhagen. “We would play this game where I had to guess who the painting was by,” she recalls. “He was always so enthusiastic when he discovered a new artist, and he had a great eye. He was always mixing things and colours – there were no rules, and I think that’s something I’ve brought to my work.”  

Knick-knacks from The Apartment are strewn around the house, from a pot of Bronx-based artist Livia Cetti’s handmade paper geraniums (from €356) and Jean Roger’s ceramic candlesticks (€342) to Needleman’s hand-woven baskets (from €300) and enamelled 18th-century glass bottles (€1,095 for a pair). “I really try to make sure that all the things I have in The Apartment are things that I would live with myself,” Busck says. “If I’m in doubt, I always think, ‘Would I bring this to my home?’ And if it doesn’t pass the test, it doesn’t go in.” Though most surfaces have been filled with trinkets and decorative objets, everything feels considered. “I like to use things – they’re not just for show,” says Busck. “That’s probably why I love baskets,  because they have been used for centuries and are so universal but can still be beautiful objects.”

She continues through to her “favourite room”, the laundry room, which has been adorned in delicate blueberry-print wallpaper from Antoinette Poisson. “I have a real soft spot for textiles and folk art,” she says, gesturing to the vintage Japanese wrapping cloth on the wall and the antique cabinet filled with variously patterned fabrics. “My kids were like, ‘Why don’t you just have the laundry room down in the basement?’, but I told them that as long as I’m doing the laundry, I need light,” she says. “I spend a lot of time here, and I think that is what a home is all about, having nice places in which to do the daily chores.”

Her bedroom is an oasis of calm, with a balcony looking onto the sea, soft-blue and ditsy floral furnishings and a recessed bookcase she designed with the architect Salem Charabi. “We can be up here reading for hours,” she says, “and in the wintertime you have the view of all these small houses lit up, and it just looks so cosy.”

She leads me through to the adjoining dressing room, where mounted rails are lined with colourful patchwork jackets, striped and polkadot shirts and vintage dresses festooned with buds. “You will not find many black pieces in there,” she laughs. Bohemian beaded necklaces hang off hooks on the walls like baubles, with everything designed to be immediately grabbable. “I’m a bit impatient, so I want getting dressed to be quick and easy,” she says. “I also feel like I wear my clothes in a different way, because I can see everything and it makes it easier to mix and match things”. 

Much like her approach to dressing, her interiors are intuitive and emotional, unbound by rules and masterfully flitting between different styles and influences. “I believe that when you follow your heart and buy things that you like, they somehow come together,” she says. “It’s the mix that makes a home interesting.”