From early childhood, Sif Steendahl Grandorf always knew that someday she would make a living from designing and making furniture – and it all started with cardboard and tape.
Grandorf grew up in a commune on a large farm in Denmark where the adults were always busy building or fixing something. The farm’s old workshop doors were permanently open, as was the basement, which was filled with hundreds of paint pots in all colours. Grandorf spent many hours building model landscapes and cities, but it didn’t take long for the cardboard and tape to be replaced with wood and screws.
“I always wanted to create room experiences, build furniture and interiors, but I couldn’t find anywhere that taught both the design part and the practical craft,” she says. “Since I was young I’ve been moving furniture around, styling rooms and building furniture. I decorated my sisters’ rooms with new colours, moved things around and found new ways of living in them. When my siblings and I left home, I was tasked with rethinking and designing my parents’ house from scratch. And when I’m travelling and arrive at a new place, wherever it might be, the first thing I do is rearrange the place to my liking.”
Grandorf’s own home, where she lives with her partner, Mathias, and their two young children, is one big playground. There, she tests ideas, colours and solutions. She’s built almost every piece of furniture in the apartment, all of which were designed around the idea of “creating more space in the same space”. Every surface and corner of the 75 m2 apartment has been fully exploited with multi-functional furniture to optimise the space.
The apartment recently had a major colour transformation in which the entire kitchen and the long corridor received a makeover. Grandorf was looking for some sharp contrasts to the many pastels that are her usual shades of choice. “Our home is a massive explosion of colour. I believe they make our senses come to life, they help to activate us and they create energy.”
One of the first things she did was remove all the doors, except for the kitchen and bathroom. The long bench built against the wall was made by Grandorf out of drawer modules from Trævarefabrikkernes Udsalg, a Danish furnishing supplier. On top of it she built her own “settle box” in order to achieve the perfect sitting height. The round table, found online, is extendable and 30 people have occasionally been seated around it. The mint-coloured chair is from FDB, a Danish furniture store, and the white and pink folding chair was found secondhand. A Murano glass lamp in delicate pink hangs above the table, “It’s as beautiful as it is wry and heavy,” says Grandorf.
Overlooking the round table is a set of prints: a photo by Stefan Wesse, a Marsden Hartley exhibition poster from Louisiana, and a small work in a black frame by Henrik Sander. From the large, sloping windows of the sitting room, the light dances its way through the little bedroom. The old window was bought from a villa in Frederiksberg whose windows were about to be replaced. “I love the thought of all the people who have looked out of that window over many years.”
In the sitting room, a small bookcase was made up of four smaller modules from Trævarefabrikernes Udsalg, which were placed at various angles and painted in the same colour as the wall. The shelves are filled with glass art, and at the bottom are the boys’ toys. Below the topmost box hangs a glass lamp found secondhand, which Grandorf refurbished. Most of the glass things were found at flea markets. The little wicker chair in the corridor is from @bohemehjem.
As all four of them share the bedroom, the space in the sitting room has been maximised to “romp about in”. One of her innovations is a multi-functional sofa layout, which Grandorf designed and built herself out of MDF boards, two mattresses and a length of velvet in burnt orange. Each part has been made so the whole can be assembled as a corner sofa, a 4m oblong sofa or a large double bed for visitors. And inside there’s room for visitors’ duvets and all of Mathias’s books that have yet to be put on shelves. A swing is used every day by both children and adults, and which can easily be taken down.
The colourful home is constantly changing, since Grandorf thrives on change, so whenever she gets an idea, she springs into action. “I never work according to a completely fixed plan. The result is often different the next month anyway. The furnishings are in constant flux, I’m always building new pieces of furniture, optimising, painting new colours according to season, mood and needs. I’ve already rebuilt the bedroom several times in order to make everything fit in such a small space. In the beginning we were two, then came a little baby and then another one, and they’re growing so fast.” Fortunately, there’s a lot of support from Mathias, although sometimes he does arrive home to find things look completely altered from when he left. “For the last several years he’s said: ‘Just do it – go for it!’ whenever I’ve got a new idea. He knows that I live and breathe transformation.”