“You start with a trash can,” says Kasper Egelund, the 47-year-old CEO and third generation co-owner of the Danish design company Vipp, with a smile, “and then it can take you many places.”
He’s not wrong. Vipp was born in 1939 when Egelund’s grandfather Holger Nielsen, a metalsmith, was asked by his wife to make a bin for her hairdressing salon. For its first 57 years of operation, the company sold just two products, both of which were pedal-operated bins, mainly to Danish dentists.
In fact, we are sitting in the latest addition to the group of “Vipp Hotels”: unconventional, idiosyncratic holiday rentals with impeccable design credentials, often in spectacular settings. Like Vipp’s other five properties, the Pencil Case in Copenhagen — a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a 1930s, Bauhaus-influenced former pencil factory — can only be occupied by one group. “As soon as you check in, it’s fully booked” is the slogan.
“I’m not the first one to have the idea of a modular home,” says Egelund, sipping a can of beer after work on a Friday afternoon. He has spiky black hair and piercing eyes that go wide when he’s energised, which is often. “All the architects loved it, Arne Jacobsen had tried it before… It never worked, but I was naïve and wanted to try as well. And the interest was huge: it got prizes,, everything — the coolest brand extension ever, blah, blah, blah.
“It’s important that each of the locations are unique,” says Egelund. “The easiest thing to do would be: ‘Let’s make 10 shelters and put them out into the world.’ Very boring. That would be like the Hilton, right? Or McDonald’s.