Afteroom Stool

From lighting and furniture, tabletop to bath, the wide offerings of Menu speaks to this Copenhagen-based company’s guiding quest for functional originality. “It’s about creating aesthetically pleasing designs that evoke true feelings as well as improving processes in people’s daily lives,” says Menu founder Bjarne Hansen. This is also reflected in its stable of influential creatives including Norm Architects, Afteroom Studio, Jonas Wagell and Krøyer-Sætter-Lassen among others standouts.

Menu is just as dedicated to responsible manufacturing as innovation. Working to locate new partners in developing countries around the world, the company searches out local factories or small private co-operations to turn out high quality goods and also provide a better economic foundation for the people involved in that production.

Time passes and, for Afteroom founders Hung-Ming Chen and Chen-Yen Wei, that's just the point. The designing duo began their Stockholm-based design company with the notion of creating modern objects that would only grow more beautiful over time—or as they put it, "design to grow old with." Beyond their own work, they see their studio as a launching point for designers around the world who share their philosophy.

"We always believed in a simple solution, bonded with good materials that show a human touch," they say. "Even though we know it is not a simple job to get to something really 'simple,' we still decided to try the idea out and our studio, Afteroom, was born."  Continuing their quest across a diversity of cultures fuels their imagination, always guided by the founding tenets of simplicity and honesty.