The Essentials With Frama’s Niels Strøyer Christophersen: Copenhagen Tables, Tokyo Guesthouses and Design Books

Before Niels Strøyer Christophersen had a design company, he had a job taking rooms apart. After high school, he worked as a bricklayer’s assistant, demolishing bathrooms and cutting tiles, while acquiring an affection for bare concrete and empty spaces that would help shape Frama, the Copenhagen company he co-founded in 2011. As a child, he had accompanied his mother to secondhand shops in search of affordable Danish ceramics and furniture. He sees his lack of formal design training as an advantage, leaving him free to appreciate an object’s material and shape without needing to assign it a purpose.

That curiosity has made Frama as much a place for breakfast as it is a source of furniture and fragrance. Its Studio Store occupies St. Pauls Apotek, a pharmacy established in 1878, where heavy wooden cabinets frame spare contemporary pieces and Apotek 57 serves house-made baked goods. Beyond that address, Frama designed Juno the Bakery’s Copenhagen premises and 7115 by Szeki’s Williamsburg shop. 

Frama’s adjustable oak-and-steel system, Shelf Library, turns 10 this year. So does Apothecary, Frama’s signature scent, which marked the anniversary with The Mechanics of Scent, an exhibition whose Paris presentation used a water wheel inside a trestle table to carry fragrance through the room.

On the road, Christophersen often chooses a friend’s couch, and at Mu Hen Ko, the guesthouse above his friends’ Tokyo pizzeria, he finds “this intimacy” in breakfast brought upstairs and service that feels improvised. Alongside a hotel project in Japan, he is planning a 150-seat Copenhagen restaurant for February 2027, complete with a daybed where children can play and waiting diners can settle in. Christophersen caught up with Observer to share his current essentials—the things that make his own days feel good, including the clothes he has kept for years and the round table he requests on a Copenhagen Monday.