By Caelan Monkman
Tucked away in a small workshop in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro community is flacoDesign, a lighting shop unlike any other. The shop is run by Casper Madsen, a daycare teacher who spends the hours he’s not teaching creating beautiful wooden lights.
Madsen refers to his creations as “handmade illuminated sculptures”—not lamps.
“I think lamps are lights with the purpose of lighting something,” said Madsen. “I just like luminance. I like the Danish hygge thing going on with just having something beautiful in your house.”
Depending on the design, Madsen says he can make up to two sculptures a day.
“Even though they’re really really different, they all have the basic idea of a structure inside of it that I have to construct,” said Madsen.
All the materials Madsen uses are cutoffs and scraps from local hardware stores and furniture factories. He uses as much as he can, and donates any scraps that are unusable for his projects to a nearby school for their design classes.
“Every single little piece can be used for something,” said Madsen. “I don’t throw anything away and I don’t think that anyone should ever throw anything away because everything can be reused. Nothing goes to waste. I like that fact—I think that’s important.”