Inside Mette and Rolf Hay’s design collection

Rolf and Mette Hay have spent their lives immersed in the design industry. Long before founding their internationally successful design brand in Copenhagen – in 2002 – both were drawn to objects and the stories and memories they carry. In their home just outside the Danish capital – a modernist house overlooking an uninterrupted expanse of sea and sky – pieces collected over the years form the backdrop to everyday life.

For our video series, The Stuff That Surrounds You, the couple invited Wallpaper* for an exclusive look at their treasures. These span from a cartoonish mint-green calculator by George Sowden for Alessi that once sat on Mette’s father’s desk (‘When I saw this first time, I didn’t know that one day I would also work with George Sowden. It’s a very nice memory and something I will treasure forever,’ she says) to their own Hay products, some of which revisit design classics – like the ‘Rey’ chair, designed Bruno Rey in 1971 and relaunched by Hay in 2022.

‘The stuff we have collected through the years is a reflection of our life. It’s a reflection of artists we met, people we admire, people whose work we have been studying,’ says Rolf. Watch the film to discover the Hays’ full collection. 

Auroville is difficult to describe as a township. There are no obvious streets, few addresses, and for long stretches you navigate by beacons such as water towers, old banyan trees and directions from people you meet along the way. What you find, instead, is a collection of alternative buildings, communities and experiments spread through a forest.

The settlement – in India’s Villupuram district, straddling the states of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry – is quite small, but the density of ideas is huge. Earth construction, water recycling, bamboo structures and passive cooling have all been tested here, often at full scale and over many years. Some have become useful technologies. Others remain experiments. Auroville has always allowed both.

It was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa, a French-Indian spiritual leader, with a view to enabling new ways of individual and collective life. French architect Roger Anger translated that idea into a master plan: a huge spiral with the Matrimandir, pictured, at its centre and four zones spreading outwards. Exploring its complex ecosystem, many wonders, and the tension between the plan that Anger drew and the slower settlement that actually grew, Nipun Prabhakar offers a guided one-day tour.

It was 1986 when Nerio Alessandri created the Unica exercising machine in his family's garage in Gambettola, Emilia-Romagna, a milestone for his then nascent company Technogym, born three years earlier from the same garage, and now unarguably the world's most successful and groundbreaking wellness company. Over the past four decades, Alessandri has maintained a designer's mindset while constantly striving to innovate as well as improve people's lives through his products, from the original compact home gym (the first of its kind and unmatched to this day) to smaller equipment, and the Pilates Reformer, one of the latest additions to the Technogym portfolio.

As Alessandri looks back on 40 years of the Unica – ‘a product a century ahead of its time’ – he tells Rosa Bertoli how Technogym was born with ‘the vision of getting the world moving’, back when ‘not only did the professional fitness sector not exist, but the very concept of a home gym was unheard of’.

This new artist’s case by Rimowa and Faber Castell offers a complete set of drawing instruments (all made in Germany), conceived to support the artistic process from sketch to colour. It includes grooved 2B graphite pencils inspired by Rimowa’s aluminium motif, 120 Polychromos colour pencils, and a Rimowa platinum-plated sharpener and eraser – all beautifully arranged in a two-tiered system, and with a leather handle for smooth carrying.