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Haled as Copenhagen’s queen of colour, former musician, and founder of File Under Pop Josephine Akvama Hoffmeyer is bringing the power of personality back to private homes, public spaces, and places of business.
And, as someone I have personally admired for a very long time, was honoured to chat with for the latest issue of Ethos.
Here’s what Josephine had to tell me:
Shall we start by setting the scene? Can you tell us little bit about yourself, what you do, and where you’re located?
My name is Josephine Akvama Hoffmeyer, I am 52 years old, and I live and work in Copenhagen. I have three children and last year I married a wonderful guy, Peter Bur Andersen, who is my partner both in my life and in my business, File Under Pop.
I founded my design studio back in 2015 and we specialise in creative surface design, clothing floors, walls and ceilings using a curated collection of colourful paints and wallpapers, as well as producing bespoke objects and handcrafted clay and lava stone tiles.
Working creatively every day fills me with joy, and I believe that colour, and our personal connections and interactions with them, the very best in an individual will emerge.
Growing up how did your early experiences influence you creatively? What people and places made the biggest impact?
My parents were never really a couple, so I spent my childhood living in two worlds. The first part with my Danish mother and the second with my father, who is Ghanaian. There was always a sense of chaos and not much stability, and I knew very early on that if I wanted to achieve something in life, it was up to me to make it happen.
As a result I’m not afraid of new things and am constantly trying to evolve, expand, and improve, pushing myself to the limit each day. Recently, I visited a wine bar that File Under Pop helped to create and the owner pointed out that the wine I chose was rather complex, and it made me think that this goes for me too.
What was the inspiration behind File Under Pop and what did you want to do differently?
Before design, music was my career, I wrote and sang professionally both in Denmark and internationally. It really is a big part of me still, it moves me and touches me like very few other things do. The name File Under Pop is also a nod to this past, and how in the 1960’s they wrote ‘File Under Popular’ on the back of the vinyl record labels to help stores place the new beat music in the right category, all names of our paint colours are inspired by popular songs too.
For me creating a space is just like conducting an orchestra. You leave out some instruments, you intensify others, you insert pauses to rest. When all these elements fall into place most of us sense this instinctively, and just like in music, thoughtful design allows our surroundings to feed our souls, improving our wellbeing and celebrating the depth and warmth of a life lived.
With a growing collection of carefully hand-crafted products, how are your paints, tiles and wallpapers designed and made?
After I left my music career behind, I moved to Italy, and it was my fascination with Mount Etna in Sicily that paved my way into surface design.
Over the years that followed I carefully developed all our products with help from great craftsman across Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, and India. Entirely processed by hand from Spanish clay and Italian lava stone, our tiles are genuinely unique, while our waterborne, acrylic paints are sustainably produced with Jotun Denmark and carry both the ‘EU Environmental Label’ and ‘The Nordic Eco-label’.
I work every day with clients so fresh ideas and needs are always emerging. This sense of continuous exploration is very important to me, and it allows me to constantly view our products in different ways.
What has been your favourite File Under Pop project to date and why?
I really do enjoy so many of our projects, but a special collaboration has been the work we did with the brilliant architectural studio RDAI for Hermès, designing a special glazed lava stone installation, mirroring the outdoor façade, for their shop in New York. We have worked with them on their new Copenhagen shop too as well as the brand’s head-office in Paris, and it is simply a pleasure to be surrounded by such attention to detail and the most exquisite craftsmanship.
The same goes for my long-time collaboration with Italian interior designer, Elisa Ossino with whom I am running the H+O apartment gallery in Milan. This is our own creative space in which we explore new ways of designing life with colour, texture, objects, furniture, and art.
How much does living and working in a creative city inform what you do?
While travel has always been a great source of inspiration and I enjoy bringing pieces back with me from different destinations, what I love most about Copenhagen is that everything is connected. I truly enjoy the sense of balance I feel in this city and my life here. Riding my bike from my home to our studio, which is in the city centre, lets me experience many different neighbourhoods, each with a unique feel and spirit.
Every day I go into our big meeting room, which has these huge windows overlooking the iconic Marble Church and it says, “Life, Truth and Jesus”. I’m more spiritual than religious, but it’s a good way of connecting with something bigger than myself, with some kind of universal force.
Can you tell us a little about what you’re currently working on, and what we can look forward to seeing next from File Under Pop?
We have recently opened a new shop in the Carlsberg City District, a part of Copenhagen that while steeped in cultural heritage has been transformed into a dynamic and vibrant urban space reflecting how we live now.
To us, it is not just a shop but a place to really connect and interact with colour and texture; and to think about what could be done differently to what is expected if we are brave enough.
In the future, we hope to open more shops and are already working on bringing our vision to other parts of Denmark and Switzerland too. Also, I really hope to dive a little deeper into designing furniture and using our materials to create them.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
This interview first appeared in issue 19 of Ethos, along with my longer-read interview with the City Architect of Malmö, Finn Williams.
Thank you again to Josephine for chatting with me. To find out more about everything we discussed, visit the File Under Pop website.
All images courtesy of File Under Pop.
Like this post? Then why not read my chat with Andreas Kofoed Sørensen and Hans Høite Augustenborg from Birdie.
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