David Thulstrup’s deft design doesn’t shout, but you’ll know it if you’ve eaten at Noma, visited any of the Vipp hospitality projects or shopped the JLindeberg flagship in Stockholm. People tend to gravitate toward the Danish designer’s work – in such numbers that he’s collaborated on his first monograph, deconstructing his special Scandinavian-modern language.

Published by Phaidon and penned by Sophie Lovell, David Thulstrup: A Sense of Place presents case studies in the context of the legend’s Scandinavian values and studied approach – from his training under Jean Nouvel and Peter Marino through the founding of his Cophenhagen practice in 2009.

Spotlights on his retail, restaurant, residential and furniture design offers satisfying eye candy but also illuminate Thulstrup’s reliance on texture, light, natural tone and a sense of place to create the backbone for what he calls ‘modern simplicity’.

‘In the beginning, I relied on my intuition to realise and articulate my projects,’ says Thulstrup, discussing the impetus for the book. ‘Now, after 14 years of making it my career, I can read my projects, verbalise what I am after far better and translate what is essentially a purely sensory awareness and a personal creative process with clarity and accuracy into both words, images, and physical structures.’

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