Meet Morten and Sofie Sørdahl
I reached out to Morten Sørdahl and his wife Sofie when we discovered their stunning old Stable home on Airbnb, nestled in the heart of Copenhagen.
Morten is a tech startup advisor helping American and European companies scale healthily, and the co-founder of a competitor-comparison platform called Leap. Sofie is an HR manager, and a strong believer in making a home beautiful. Both have a keen eye and passion for good design. After working with them to outfit their home workspace, I chatted with Morten to hear the story of their historic house’s transformation.
- Ken Tomita (co-founder and CEO)
Design
Ken: You work in the world of tech startups and company growth. Where does design come in?
Morten: I took a degree in graphic design when I was younger. Design is the enabler. I like when things are cut down to the bare minimum. I’m a big fan of nature, and it’s a great source of inspiration to find a solution based on the simplest idea.
Good design can compensate for what you can’t say with words. I don’t require many items. I like when things look as they should, and I’m very strongly opinionated about it!
Cross Cultural Minimalism
Ken: I remember when I first saw the house, it looked so minimalist. I thought it was designed to be a hotel. Let’s hear about that a little bit.
Morten: In a hotel, everything is done by purpose. There’s a reason why everything is built the way it is. We wanted to have that here as well.
We wanted to merge Japanese and Scandinavian design. So all the furniture and surfaces are very low, never reaching more than a meter and a half.
When you take in your surroundings, you’re not going to get distracted by anything. When you wake up and are laying in bed, you can see past the couch because it’s on a very low level.
It’s a Japanese minimalist way of thinking that goes through the whole house, though I actually got the idea from the height-limitation on houses in Copenhagen. They’re not allowed to go above four stories because then you can’t see all the beautiful buildings. So, same here. I wanted to keep the view of the outside.