Welcome to The Apartment: the Copenhagen gallery where you can stay the night — and practically everything is for sale

In 2011, Tina Seidenfaden Busck launched a gallery on the second floor of a grand, 18th-century, butter-yellow townhouse facing one of Copenhagen’s historic canals.

She stocked what she loved: vernacular furniture, folk textiles, naïve ceramics, black-and-white photography, mid-century design and modern art. Her maximalist edit offered an antidote to Denmark’s reputation for functionality, mass production and the democratic use of colour and line — a look masterminded by the likes of Hans Wegner, Finn Juhl and Arne Jacobsen.

Everything was displayed as if she lived within the gallery’s four walls. She called it The Apartment. ‘It was like it was an extension of my home,’ she says — quite literally, because she lived upstairs.

Busck was a pioneer of the ‘shoppable home’ concept, where everything from the carpets to the crockery is for sale. After a decade spent working for an international auction house, followed by a stint at one of Scandinavia’s leading contemporary art galleries, she had the idea of carving out a new role for herself: something straddling the worlds of curator, adviser, dealer and interior designer.

‘It started with a few clients that I was helping with their spaces,’ she says. ‘I would show them mood boards, suggesting things, but then I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a place to show these concepts in the flesh?

‘I didn’t want to be a gallery in the traditional sense, with the responsibility of representing artists and their careers, organising exhibitions and making sure their work was placed in the right institutions. Instead, I felt I could offer a filter, picking pieces I love, then selling them on consignment or the secondary market.’

Busck grew The Apartment into a successful business and a landmark for aesthetes in a city with a thriving art and design scene. It gained legions of followers on social media, and became a successful online store, with clients in Europe, Asia, the United States and the Middle East. Turnover doubled every year.

In 2018, The Apartment hosted the Danish leg of a global tour to promote a painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi, which was being offered at Christie’s in New York. Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25 is one of the artist’s signature ghostly interiors. Busck painted her walls in the same cool blue tones.

‘Hammershøi spent much of his life living only two streets away, in apartments similar in feel to this one,’ she says. ‘It was great to be able to bring the picture back here.’ The work went on to sell for more than $5 million, with the buyer later revealed to be the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The showroom moved to the first floor, then the ground floor, while Busck, her husband Mathias and their three children relocated to the nearby fishing village of Taarbæk.

By 2025, however, she felt The Apartment needed a new direction. ‘I wanted a stronger focus on the art, and a different format,’ she says. ‘Without knowing what that would be, I closed the doors.’

Serendipitously, a few months later, the fourth-floor apartment became available. ‘So I decided to create something that kept the DNA of The Apartment, but where people could stay,’ she explains. The hybrid two-bedroom holiday let and exhibition space relaunched In November that year, converting The Apartment into a true residence.

‘The new space evolves more organically,’ says Busck. ‘Before, I would change the display twice a year. Now, I move furniture around, change the paintings on the walls — including pieces from my own collection and things for sale — all the time.’

The inaugural exhibition, which coincided with Copenhagen’s annual design festival, 3daysofdesign, was called Artists I Collect and Admire. It included the bold, geometric work of Yto Barrada, who represented France at the 2026 Venice Biennale; abstract paintings by Nathalie du Pasquier, a founding member of Milan’s Memphis Group; photographs of David Hockney in India taken by the dealer and collector John Kasmin, as well as pictures shot by Hockney’s sometime lover and muse Peter Schlesinger; and illustrations by the so-called ‘Greek Picasso’ Alekos Fassianos, on loan from his estate in Athens.

Some of her favourite pieces, though, were by Isabella Ducrot, an Italian artist who works on fabric and paper. ‘I love her work,’ she says. ‘She is 95 years old, and her apartment and studio are above the Doria Pamphilj museum in Rome. Her husband had a travel company, and she toured the world, collecting material from Iran, India and Japan, which serves as her inspiration. Her first retrospective — curated by the former director of the Whitney, Adam Weinberg — opens this year at the Madre Museum in Naples, then tours to the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo and MoMa PS1 in New York.’

Among the other objects she praises is a lamp made from wild rush by Deborah Needleman, the former editor-in-chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, who retrained as a basket weaver in 2018. ‘She cherishes a tradition that is 10,000 years old,’ says Busck.

She also highlights tapestries by Märta Måås-Fjetterström, a Swedish artist who founded a workshop in 1919, blending rural Nordic traditions with modernist tendencies. ‘I adore her work and source pieces she designed, as well as examples by Barbro Nilsson and Marianne Richter, who both worked in Måås-Fjetterström’s atelier after her death in 1941. I’m drawn to their historic roots, rich patterns and tactility. I am by no means an expert in these things, but I know what I like and trust my instinct.’

Busck says she always curates by intuition. She points to more items in each room: Finnish ceramics by Birger Kaipiainen; Alvar Aalto stools; Paavo Tynell chandeliers from the 1930s; fabrics from Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler; and an antique brass four-poster bed, which she says came from a friend who dealt in antiques and was moving to Switzerland. ‘She said, “I don’t have room for this bed anymore, and there is one person in particular I can think of who might enjoy it.” I replied, “That’s such a coincidence, I’m starting a new project and would love it.” It’s nice and high and has a lot of patina.’

Even the colours of the walls are Busck’s own — part of her collection of 33 paints produced in collaboration with the Danish interiors studio St. Leo. ‘They’re largely inspired by art,’ she says. ‘I went to museums and took pictures, and borrowed ideas from my library of art books.’ The shade she named ‘Atelier White’ evokes a blank canvas. ‘Charleston Green’ is named after the Sussex home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. ‘Balthus Purple’ and ‘Larrson Blue’ are dedicated to the French and Swedish painters’ palettes.

‘It means a lot to people if she likes something,’ says Rikke Juel Brandt, Christie’s Danish representative. ‘A lot of people put their trust in Tina’s taste.’

In the future, Busck plans to organise several short exhibitions each year, in between guests’ bookings, giving clients and the wider public a chance to visit The Apartment. She’s also exploring beyond Copenhagen. To coincide with Art Basel Paris in October, The Apartment is hosting a pop-up on Rue Saint-Roch, together with the Danish fashion brand La Bagatelle and jewellers Griegst.

‘I don’t like to put it into a box,’ Busck says when people ask her to describe what exactly she does. ‘I’m just Tina. If I like something and would live with it, I’ll show it.’

Art Basel Paris takes place at the Grand Palais, 23-25 October 2026

theapartment.dk