Working Wonders

Denmark’s Hans Bølling talks about his playful, enduring designs.

- Natalia Rachlin

The Danish architect and designer Hans Bølling is 88 years old and an enthusiastic lover of life. But most of all, he is a lover of his wife. ‘My inspiration for everything I do all comes back to her,’ says Bølling as he points to Søs, his partner of 60 years. They are drinking white wine in the living room of the home they have shared for as many decades – a single-storey pre-fab house that Bølling has extended seven times, in Charlottenlund, a coastal suburb north of Copenhagen.

Displayed proudly on tabletops, forgotten on top of a stack of books on a windowsill, and scattered across shelves in Bølling’s home studio, sit prototypes and early models of dogs and ducks and dopey little dudes; exotic birds roost here and there, a shapely mermaid emerges a few times over. Stray heads of horses, sailors and their boats, monkeys on wheels and other wooden delights animate and populate this place.

These figurines – including Oscar, an affable, droopy-eared dog designed in 1953, and an elegant duck with its squat little duckling from 1957 – are arguably Bølling’s best-known creations. They were almost all initially crafted as gifts for Søs, and later, for their two children. But Bølling’s rich portfolio also boasts buildings and furniture designs, making him a nuanced, multidisciplinary talent who now, late in life, finds his work being rediscovered, or simply discovered, with some long-lost designs being put into production for the first time.

‘I always say my career has been spent playing, not working,’ says Bølling. ‘I can’t sit still. I love to fiddle around with things and experiment. I can’t help myself: I’ll wake in the middle of the night with an idea and run to sketch it down. It never stops being fun!’