A 1950s Danish Kitchen at Industrimuseet

Details from the Workers’ Homes in Horsens—and how historic interiors find their way into my illustration work.

At Industrimuseet in Horsens, visitors can walk through a series of workers’ apartments furnished to represent different periods of Danish life. The museum calls the exhibition Arbejderboligerne—the Workers’ Homes—and its interiors range from the 1880s to the year 2000.

Kitchen provisitions and household packaging beside the window in the Workers' Homes exhibition.

I was particularly drawn to the 1950s apartment. Not because it presented an idealized period interior, but because of the accumulation of practical details: the heavy stove, enamel cookware, utensils kept within reach, and unexpectedly strong combinations of color.

Color in the 1950s Kitchen

The kitchen complicates the familiar idea of Scandinavian interiors as pale, neutral, and restrained. Its green walls, turquoise tiles, orange cooking surface, blue enamelware, and floral cooking pot are anything but subdued.

The colors do not appear to have been selected as a coordinated palette. Each belongs to a particular object or surface, yet together they give the room its character. Function came first, but the result is visually distinctive.

The cooking area is equally direct. Wooden utensils hang beside the stove. Pots and kettles remain visible. Nothing is concealed behind a continuous wall of fitted cabinetry. The room shows how it is meant to be used.

The Details Around Daily Life

The smaller objects were just as useful to study. In the bathroom, plastic combs stand together in a cup alongside familiar household containers. They are inexpensive objects, but their shapes, colors, and placement immediately locate the room in a particular period.

This is one of the strengths of the Workers’ Homes exhibition. A single vintage object can be admired in isolation, but a furnished interior shows how objects related to one another: what was kept beside the stove, how crowded a bathroom shelf became, and which colors regularly appeared in the same room.

The apartments are museum installations rather than homes left untouched by their occupants. Even so, they provide something photographs of individual design objects cannot: a sense of proportion, proximity, and use.

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From Museum Visit to Illustration

I often photograph historic interiors as visual research. I am rarely interested in reproducing an entire room exactly. Instead, I collect particulars—a tiled wall, an old stove, the shape of a utensil rack, or a color combination I would not have invented deliberately.

Enamelware, turquoise tiles, and an orange stovetop at Industrimuseet.

The kitchen illustration below was not based directly on the apartment at Industrimuseet. Its room and figure are imagined. But it shares the practical density I noticed there: objects remain visible, the surfaces carry signs of activity, and the kitchen is presented as a working part of the home rather than an immaculate backdrop.

Visits like this expand the visual vocabulary I can draw from. The value is not in copying a period room. It is in seeing how people actually organized their surroundings—and noticing the details that make an invented scene feel credible.

What interests me is the specificity. A generalized “vintage kitchen” can easily become decorative shorthand, assembled from familiar period motifs. The museum apartment offers something more useful: colors that do not match perfectly, objects accumulated for different reasons, and practical arrangements that would be difficult to invent from style alone.

Those details help me build an interior that feels inhabited rather than designed around an aesthetic. I may change the architecture, combine references, or introduce an imagined figure, but the physical evidence remains underneath: how objects gather around a stove, how much space a working surface allows, and where signs of daily activity are likely to appear.

The resulting drawing is fictional, but it is anchored in observation.

An imagined Dais kitchen, built from observed period details rather than a single historical interior.

You can see more of my narrative and interior illustration in my art portfolio. Selected prints are also available in my Etsy shop. 🐰