The creative director of Kinnasand, Isa Glink, showcases her new sculptural curtain collection
Against the rural landscape bordering the eastern coast of Denmark, just outside the old port town of Ebeltoft, the sleek Sevil Peach designed Kvadrat HQ has found an unlikely location for one of Europe’s leading textile design companies. Isolated within a rolling green landscape, the building’s exterior appears bland and unassuming. Seemingly single storey, in fact it follows the lie of the land, with its internal staircases echoing the natural rise and fall of the underlying hills. As that fact alone suggests, the interior is entirely unanticipated from the outside. Visitors enter through an imposing metal door, which opens automatically on arrival. Walking through is like stumbling into a trove of light, elegant design spread sparingly across a string of office spaces and showrooms that blend into a single open structure. Sheltered from the wind, the air is still and buzzes with easy efficiency.
Inside we are introduced to Isa Glink, the creative director of Kinnasand, who has draped sample fabrics from her latest collection, Tailor Made, at various heights beneath a luminous skylight. Their presence underscores the company’s own unique floorplan, driving home the collection’s key concept, which she describes as ‘fine-tailoring applied to interiors’. She herself wears a fitted one-piece suit which billows at the shoulders and falls loosely from the waist, and explains how the collection attempts to channel the feeling we get when we wear well fitted clothes with a stylish cut, crisp surface and well matched colourway. It reapplies this experience to their interiors, with a building’s architecture becoming its body.
The stand out piece is a curtain called Clique, a metallic-shade of fabric dotted with metal press buttons that allow it to be pinned into any number of shapes. Glink demonstrates, bunching and draping the fabric into a series of inventive silhouettes, occasionally reminiscent of London shades, and as she does so the fabric’s full sculptural potential becomes clear. Glink explains how this inherent malleability mimics the personal tailored touches we all add to our own clothes when we style ourselves each morning, whether popping a collar or rolling up sleeves.
The range of inspirations is varied, and the collection shies away from more obvious references, or anything overwhelmingly haute couture. In fact, Glink is proud to highlight one of her more unusual designs, a series of neon-coloured mesh drapes reminiscent of sportswear. Other textiles bear visible seams or are composed of highly textural layered materials, from delicate films of tulle to a yarn woven out of ribbons. The classic patterns Glink has picked up and appropriated feel creatively reimagined and reduced for the modern interior, with tweed and corduroy as contemporary, in this context, as pinstripe and herringbone.
With Tailor Made, Glink takes a deceptively simple approach, but reimagining retired ideas in an new context relies on highly original thinking. Familiar yet fresh, the collection exemplifies the ease with which Nordic-inspired designers continue to flit between pared down practicality and playful innovation.