New Works: Copenhagen's House of New Voices

New Works is a Copenhagen design house founded in 2015 by Nikolaj Meier and Knut Bendik Humlevik, working across furniture, lighting and objects with an emphasis on sculptural form and material honesty. It hasn't reached Objena's shelves yet — this is a research chapter, not a stock listing — but its lighting in particular is worth knowing before it arrives.

A studio built on four values

Meier and Humlevik split the business along familiar lines: Meier runs New Works as CEO, managing the numbers and daily operations, while Humlevik shapes its look and feel as Creative Director. The studio works from Bredgade 42 in central Copenhagen and states its identity around four values — natural, experimental, tactility and craftsmanship — which read less as marketing copy than as a working brief: respect what a material already is, let designers experiment with new forms and textures, keep the tactile experience authentic, and blend traditional craft with techniques drawn from further afield. New Works describes its own collection as sitting "at the intersection between old and new. Light and dark. Design and art" — a house happy to let contradictions sit next to each other rather than resolve them into a single neutral look.

The Lantern that opened the account

One of the studio's earliest collections was Lantern, designed with the Norwegian duo Anderssen & Voll and built from hand-blown opal glass on a steel base. It takes the shape of a traditional lantern — the kind that reads as a familiar object from across a room — and reworks it as a diffuse, glare-free light source, since expanded into pendant, floor, table and wall versions. It's a useful early marker for how New Works approaches a brief: start with a recognisable form, then let the material do the reinterpreting, rather than inventing an unfamiliar shape from nothing.

Kizu: marble and acrylic, held in balance

The house's more recent Kizu table lamp, designed by Lars Tornøe, makes the same instinct more literal. A hemisphere-shaped acrylic diffuser appears to balance on top of a rounded marble base — two sculptural forms stacked so the join reads as tension rather than construction. It ships in white, black or one of several marble finishes, in two sizes, and there's now a cordless version with a ten-hour battery for a lamp that doesn't need to sit near a plug. It's the piece the calendar for this article was built around, and it isn't registered at Objena yet — the FUTURE listing stays FUTURE until a supply position exists.

Twenty designers, one Copenhagen address

New Works names close to twenty collaborating designers on its own site, from Anderssen & Voll and Lars Tornøe to Panter & Tourron and Theresa Rand, alongside its current furniture and lighting range — the Nebra table and floor lamps, the Rand side table, the Atlas stool. That's a wider net than a single-studio house casts, and it's consistent with how New Works talks about itself: not one voice, but a Copenhagen address that a rotating group of designers work through, bound by the same four values rather than by a shared signature style.

Why we're watching, not yet listing

Objena's active catalogue currently runs through Emeco, Form & Refine and FRAMA, and New Works isn't one of them. Nothing on this page claims Objena distributes, imports or is authorised to sell New Works — we aren't, and we won't say so until a supply agreement actually exists. If you want a comparable Copenhagen material logic in lighting today, FRAMA's Eiffel Pendant and T-Lamp are on the shelf now, both left in unlacquered brass so the material ages rather than staying frozen under a finish; the full house story is in the FRAMA chapter. For more on how a room takes to a single considered light fitting rather than a scatter of them, see light as object.

Three questions

When was New Works founded, and by whom? New Works was founded in 2015 in Copenhagen by Nikolaj Meier, who runs the business as CEO, and Knut Bendik Humlevik, who directs the look and feel of the collection as Creative Director. The studio is based at Bredgade 42 in Copenhagen.

What does New Works design? New Works works across furniture, lighting and smaller objects, built around four stated values — natural, experimental, tactility and craftsmanship. Its current range includes the Nebra table and floor lamps, the Rand side table and the Atlas stool, and it names roughly twenty collaborating designers on its own site.

Is New Works furniture available at Objena? Not yet. Objena's catalogue currently carries active products from Emeco, Form & Refine and FRAMA; New Works 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. If that changes, this article will be updated to say so plainly.