Notes from the North
Seydisfjordur, I will come back
I've just returned from three weeks I won't forget easily — a cruise from Copenhagen through Norway's fjords, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. I went to rest and to look. I came back full.
Copenhagen was a different pleasure entirely — beautiful, considered, alive with good design and extraordinary food. I took a boat tour through the canals and what struck me most was how effortlessly the city weaves new architecture into its historic fabric. Nothing jars. Nothing competes. The most extraordinary example is Copenhill — a working waste-to-energy plant topped with a ski slope and hiking trail, clean energy wrapped in breathtaking design. A building that is simultaneously useful, beautiful and completely unexpected.
The food deserves its own mention. At Selma I ate from the small tasting menu and finished with cheese rather than dessert — every dish quietly exceptional, accompanied by locally brewed beer. Breakfast at 12CPH became something of a ritual — it was so good and so close to my hotel that I went back more than once. Eggs Benedict on two crispy sweet potato rounds, fresh orange juice, and a yogurt so beautifully presented it was almost a shame to eat it. And no visit to Copenhagen would be complete without a stop at Hart Bageri — a tiny spot with great service, no queue and the softest, gooeyest cinnamon bun I've ever eaten.
I lost a happy afternoon in Arjoh Studio too, the kind of design shop that reminds you what it looks like when craft and living are taken seriously.
Some places simply stop you. Seydisfjordur, a small town tucked at the end of a fjord in eastern Iceland, was one of them. The backdrop alone — mountains, waterfalls, the sound of rivers running constantly beneath everything — would have been enough. But what made it extraordinary was the town itself. Every home painted its own colour, every garden spilling with blooms, and an easy warmth between its artistic inhabitants that felt rare and genuinely welcoming. I could have stayed much longer.
In the Shetlands and Iceland I indulged myself in knitwear — the kind you buy knowing you'll wear it for decades. And in Reykjavik I found a small ceramic vase from Jardlingur, a collection of miniature vases by artists Kogga and Elsa Björd — each one feeling like a quiet distillation of the Icelandic landscape surrounding it. One came home with me immediately.
At Harpa — Reykjavik's extraordinary concert hall and cultural centre, its glass facade mirroring the sea and sky around it — I discovered the work of Jón Ólafsson, a maker from Sandnes, a remote farm in the rugged Westfjords. He carves and paints every native Icelandic bird entirely by hand from natural wood, each one unique, each one unmistakably of its place. One came home with me too.
Throughout the trip I made a point of buying directly from makers and artisans — the knitwear, the ceramics, the bird. It felt important. A small act of solidarity with people who make things by hand, as I do.
I have hundreds of photographs and a head full of texture, colour and light. It's already quietly finding its way into the work. A few moments from the journey below.
