DESIGNER

REBECCA HEIN

2026 SEP

This time, Meet the Society travels to Copenhagen. Hein Studio is the work of Rebecca Hein, a designer who set out to give Danish design a sculptural kind of beauty, and we asked her how it began and where it stands now. Following her conviction that a vase should do more than simply hold flowers, we look into the moment where art and everyday life meet inside a single object.

Intro · The Need to Make Something

Rebecca has always been someone who needed to make things with her hands. She drew constantly as a child and spent hours moving the furniture around her room, shaping the space she lived in. Wanting clothes no one else had, she began sewing her own, and before long she was making them for her friends as well. That was the first time she understood what making something actually meant.

“I think that was the first time I really felt that something I had made could bring joy to someone else, and not only to me.”

— Rebecca Hein

She studied fashion design and built her career across several Danish fashion brands. The making itself she loved, but she grew uneasy with producing garment after garment that disappeared from the shops the moment a season turned. What she wanted were objects that stayed — things that would still be beautiful, and still worth having, years later.

After her three children were born she spent five years at home, and the house came to mean far more to her life and her sense of self. It was there that she saw first-hand how deeply the spaces and objects around us settle into our moods, our relationships, and the way we live from one day to the next.

On a walk one day, Rebecca told her husband Brian that she wanted to start an interior brand. The conviction had arrived suddenly and completely. His answer was offhand and warm at once: “If that is what you really want, I’ll start by building you a little studio in the garden.” Hein Studio took its first step in 2016, from a small studio at the end of that garden.

For the first few years she worked as a fashion designer by day and spent her evenings and weekends developing products and searching for manufacturers, refining the website and building the brand’s visual language piece by piece. With little help available to her, she had to learn every part of it from scratch. Brian, who had been quietly handling stock and packing alongside her, joined the brand properly around the pandemic. Today he is CEO and Rebecca leads the creative direction.

Beauty · A Vase Is Never Just a Vase

When Hein Studio opened its doors, Rebecca felt something was missing from Danish design. Scandinavian design had long leaned towards the spare, the refined, the restrained. What she wanted to add was an artistic, sculptural sensibility — an object faithful to its purpose and still present enough to stop someone where they stand and hold their eye a second time.

“To me, a vase is never simply something to put flowers in.

It is the piece at the centre of the table where the people you love gather, the one that holds a wildflower your child picks on the way home from school, or the flowers someone hands you because they were thinking of you.”

— Rebecca Hein

The objects we handle every day become the good memories of our lives, she says, and so they deserve as much care as any work of art. Dissolving the line between art and functional object, and making ordinary days a little extraordinary — that is the value Hein Studio holds closest.

Every design carries its own season and its own set of questions, so choosing one is difficult. But asked which piece holds that philosophy best, she points to the Ostrea 25 vase in solid brass — a vessel that does its job and is a sculpture in its own right. The recent Eclipse collection and the Canyon vase are the work closest to her heart at the moment. Canyon in particular is an idea she carried in her head for years before finally bringing it into the world.

Inspiration · Raw Nature, Urban Energy

Rebecca draws on the artists, architects and sculptors who broke the existing rules of form — the Japanese aesthetic of empty space, mid-century architecture, and names such as Jean Arp, Isamu Noguchi and Brancusi.

Nature is the other great source. Raised beside forests and the sea, she still finds new forms in the stones along a path, in cliffs, rivers and the ocean, in icebergs drifting on the surface and in still reflections on water. What moves her is not only the beauty of nature but its rough vitality — the way water, wind and long stretches of time quietly shape an entire landscape.

Copenhagen keeps her supplied with a creative charge through its architecture and museums, its fashion and culture, and the people who live their days with a certain eye. But a city tends to keep the mind running. Nature gives her the opposite: a quiet stillness. Her work, in the end, is an attempt to hold both in one place — the sensory energy of the city and the organic calm of the natural world.

Process · Form Begins in the Hands

Rebecca’s process runs closer to intuition than to reason. Her mind rarely stops, so ideas tend to arrive mid-walk, wandering through a museum, sitting blankly in front of the fireplace, or in the moment just before sleep. A sketchbook is always within reach. Some designs come out in a single clean line; others stay in her mind for years before the first mark reaches paper.

The first form is usually shaped by hand. More and more is designed in 3D and generated by AI, but she holds on to that human beginning, something touched and felt, because she wants the warmth and the breath of the maker to remain in the finished object.

“I know a design is finished when the object moves something deep in me. When I keep looking at it, and keep finding new details each time.”

— Rebecca Hein

With some designs that feeling arrives at once, as if it had always been meant to. Others stay in the studio for months, adjusted a millimetre at a time until the proportions fall exactly into place.

Craft · The People Who Make It

Many of Hein Studio’s pieces pass through human hands. Turning the forms she shapes herself into finished objects takes close collaboration with skilled artisans, and the work with the craftsmen in India means a great deal to her. She sends over the models she has shaped by hand, and they carry them across into metal through sand casting. However difficult a design is to realise, they stay with it together until a way is found.

A finished piece holds the care and the energy of both sides. The artisans understand the character of a design and complete it beautifully, and within that process there is room for the nature of the material and the hand of the maker to come through.

“The small irregularities in something moulded, polished or blown by hand are honest proof that a person shaped it with real care. It is what makes every piece a little different, and what makes it feel like yours rather than something mass-produced.”

— Rebecca Hein

Her affection for materials that change slowly over time begins here. Brass takes on a deep patina, stone reveals a grain of its own, and glass catches the light differently according to its texture and form. An object, she believes, can grow more beautiful as it is used and settles into a space.

Home · A Home, Not a Showroom

Home is where Rebecca fully unwinds, refills her energy and is closest to her family. The homes she loves are the ones with warmth and personal taste in them: filled with beautiful objects, layers of memory, and unexpected, witty details. A home should never look like a sleek, cold showroom, she says. It should quietly reveal the life of the person living in it.

A house shared with Brian, three children and a dog has to be able to hold the noise and movement of real life. The house they are building now is being shaped with each of the people who will fill it in mind — the children’s rooms designed around their individual characters, the shared spaces such as the living room made so the family naturally gathers there, and so that it can hold everyone comfortably on days like Christmas.

In their previous home, the place she loved most was beside the fireplace; every winter the whole family competed for that warm seat. It was a place that meant warmth, ease and being together. The kitchen was the other natural gathering point — where they cooked, talked, and collected the family’s best moments.

Philosophy · Objects That Earn Their Place

TPS · Objects that deepen with time, and the value of things made by hand — this is the way of living TPS believes in. In a world already full of things, what does it mean to make something new?

Rebecca · I believe an object has to justify its own existence before you add it to the world. It should carry an aura that outlasts its era, it should be beautifully made, and it should give something to the person who lives with it. Extending the life of the objects we keep around us is, to my mind, the most meaningful way design can reduce unnecessary consumption. Making things people want to hold on to for a long time, things they might one day pass on to the next generation — that is the path Hein Studio is on.

Closing · The Joy of Finding Something Special

TPS · When a Hein Studio piece finds its place in someone’s everyday life, what do you hope they feel?

Rebecca · I hope they feel the joy of having found something entirely their own. That they take pride in seeing it at home, and want to show it to the friends and family who come to visit. Above all, I hope the piece keeps giving them a small, continuing smile long after the moment they first held it. It has long been my dream for Hein Studio to be remembered as the brand that opened a new chapter in Danish design — one where art, sculpture, craftsmanship and everyday use coexist perfectly within a single object.

HEIN STUDIO

Making everyday extraordinary · Copenhagen

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