Audo Copenhagen: Menu and By Lassen, One House

Audo Copenhagen is the Danish design house formed on 1 June 2023, when Menu and By Lassen — two separately run Copenhagen furniture brands — merged their collections and retail operations under a single name. It is not a new studio with a debut collection; it is two century-spanning archives, Menu's catering-supplier-turned-furniture-house and By Lassen's revival of the modernist Lassen brothers, now sold from one Nordhavn address as one brand.

Two names, one house

Menu began in 1976 as Danish Steel House, a Fredensborg workshop supplying stainless-steel catering equipment; founder Simon Hansen's son Bjarne Hansen renamed the company Menu in 1998 and steered it into furniture, lighting and tableware. By Lassen took a different route into the same city: it exists to keep two Danish modernist architects, brothers Mogens and Flemming Lassen, in production — pieces like Mogens's Kubus candle tray and Flemming's Tired Man chair, drawn in the 1930s, still made today. Søren Lassen, Mogens's grandson, founded the company in 2008 to do exactly that. Both houses were acquired separately by the Italian design group Design Holding in 2022 — which also owns Flos, B&B Italia and Louis Poulsen — and folded into Audo Copenhagen the following year, under Joachim Kornbek Engell-Hansen, grandson of Menu's own founder. A family furniture business, run three generations deep, now sits inside a European design conglomerate.

Audo House, Nordhavn

The brand operates out of Audo House on Aarhusgade in Nordhavn, a converted industrial building that opened in 2019 as "The Audo" under Menu and was renamed for the merged house. It functions as showroom, café, concept shop, event space and — unusually for a furniture brand — a boutique hotel with its own guest rooms, so the collection can be seen in situ rather than only in a shopfront. It is the kind of single-site, brand-as-building move that houses like FRAMA (a Copenhagen furniture studio built inside a working 1878 pharmacy) have also made: put the collection somewhere you can stay in, not just look at.

The Androgyne idea

Audo Copenhagen's clearest calling card is the Androgyne collection by Norwegian designer Danielle Siggerud — a dining and lounge table series pairing an oak base, in natural or dark-stained finish, with a top in oak veneer or stone: Kunis Breccia or Grey Galaxy marble. The 120 cm round dining table in natural oak starts at €3,545. The design logic — a sculptural base carrying a distinct top material — is the same material honesty Objena already sells through FRAMA's Sintra Table, which pairs a polished marble top with a contrasting rounded cork base rather than hiding the join. Two houses, a shared conviction that the base and the top are allowed to look like different materials, because they are.

Why we're watching, not yet listing

Objena's active catalogue currently runs through Emeco, Form & Refine and FRAMA, and Audo Copenhagen isn't one of them. We write about houses ahead of stocking them; it's how the outreach list gets built, and how a reader searching for a house we don't carry yet still gets an honest answer instead of nothing. Nothing on this page is a claim that Objena distributes, imports or is authorised to sell Audo Copenhagen — we aren't, and won't say so until a supply agreement actually exists. If you want the same Copenhagen material logic today, oak paired honestly with stone or aluminium, FRAMA's Sintra Table and Rivet Chair are on the shelf now; the full house story is in the FRAMA chapter.

For the wider case on why Objena names the maker, the year and the material on every piece it does sell — including houses like this one that it doesn't, yet — see why we list.

Three questions

What is Audo Copenhagen? Audo Copenhagen is a Danish design house formed on 1 June 2023, when two established Danish brands — Menu and By Lassen — merged their collections, teams and retail operations under one name. It sits inside Design Holding's portfolio of design brands alongside Flos, B&B Italia and Louis Poulsen, and is based at Audo House, a combined café, concept shop, boutique hotel and event space in the Nordhavn district of Copenhagen.

When did Menu and By Lassen merge to form Audo Copenhagen? The merger was announced in 2023 and Audo Copenhagen launched globally on 1 June 2023. Menu and By Lassen had both been acquired by the Italian design group Design Holding in 2022; the merger folded the two Danish houses' collections into a single brand the following year, led by Joachim Kornbek Engell-Hansen, grandson of Menu's founder Simon Hansen.

Is Audo Copenhagen furniture available at Objena? Not yet. Objena's catalogue currently carries active products from Emeco, Form & Refine and FRAMA; Audo Copenhagen is not among the houses we have a supply agreement with. We are writing about it as part of our ongoing research into houses we don't yet stock — the pipeline that runs ahead of what's on the shelf. If that changes, this article will be updated to say so plainly.