Cult’s team shares the standout releases, themes and conversations from this year’s 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen.

For a festival that has grown into one of the design calendar’s most closely watched fixtures, 3daysofdesign 2026 distinguished itself through a collective willingness among exhibitors to slow down. Held across Copenhagen from 10–12 June, the festival turned the Danish capital into a living showroom, with brand homes, galleries and historic buildings replacing the standard convention centres more typical of design week programming, allowing conversations and discoveries to unfold at a pace no trade hall could match. 

Cult, the Australian distributor behind NAU, has released a report capturing its team’s impressions of the event, and the recurring note throughout is that of restraint. Across dozens of exhibitions, from &Tradition’s Traces to Fritz Hansen’s Sound Club, the brief seemed to be less about announcing new hero pieces and more about building environments in which those pieces might comfortably live.

Writing in the report, Cult founder and chief executive Richard Munao, refers to that same quality when describing Fritz Hansen’s Sound Club, an installation spanning a listening lounge, courtyard and showroom that combined recordings from the brand’s own production process with a curated vinyl release and live DJ sessions. 

For Munao, the exhibition captured something larger than sound design alone, offering a reminder that the strongest work shapes an experience, not merely a space. He also highlighted the continued relevance of Verner Panton, whose furniture and lighting featured across numerous brand presentations this year to mark what would have been the designer’s hundredth birthday, describing the throughline as proof that genuinely great design outlives its era.

Australian design finds its footing on the world stage

A local thread also runs through the report with Australian design’s growing presence in Copenhagen. NAU returned for a second consecutive year with The Moment Is NAU, an exhibition built around new and evolving collections from Adam Goodrum and Tom Fereday, staged within a light-filled gallery designed to invite lingering over quick browsing. Munao writes with evident pride about the international debut of Goodrum’s Soft Spot, a generously proportioned seating collection, alongside Nick Rennie’s Breeze Block, a customisable outdoor table series built around interchangeable inserts. Together, the pair were held up in the report as proof that Australian design has moved beyond the point of participating in the global conversation to having a genuine place within it.

Mathew Fowler, Cult’s contract sales manager and creative lead for NAU, expands on this theme in his own contribution, noting the presence of Design By Them and Claire Delmar’s Latitude exhibition, which drew more than forty Australian designers under one roof. For Fowler, NAU’s own presentation demonstrated a growing maturity, framed as a complete living environment built on the same material honesty and optimism the brand has always claimed as its own. NAU product development manager Jason O’Neill strikes a similar note, describing a year of groundwork spent preparing the brand’s collections and production processes for the European market.

Colour, craftsmanship and the pull of the archive

In the CULT Insights section of the report, several material and stylistic themes surface repeatedly across the individual contributions. Marketing manager Rebecca Fox writes of brands choosing to tell stories through fully realised domestic interiors instead of conventional product displays, citing GUBI’s Scenes exhibition, curated within the brand’s Nordhavn headquarters, as the clearest example of collections allowed to emerge naturally within a lived-in setting. Fox also traces a broader appetite for archival storytelling, from Fredericia’s Chronicle of Danish Design, which paired century-old furniture-making traditions with new releases from Nanna Ditzel and Barber Osgerby, to Carl Hansen & Søn’s dialogue between Hans J. Wegner’s legacy and contemporary works by Fabricius Kastholm.

Regional sales manager Delaney Brocket, attending her first 3daysofdesign, describes Fredericia’s presentation as feeling closer to a museum than a showroom, while singling out Vipp’s collaboration with Barcelona studio Mesura for the way its butter-yellow loft installation blurred the boundary between exhibition and home. Sales consultant Kira Amon adds colour, quite literally, to this picture, noting a more confident and playful use of pattern and upholstery across Danish brands this year, alongside a sustained appreciation for craftsmanship and material legacy that she sees running beneath every exhibition regardless of how contemporary its surface treatment.

Sustainability continued to move to the centre of these conversations. Mater’s Project Materia exhibition demonstrated how its proprietary Matek material transforms waste streams into finished furniture, while &Tradition’s Rely chair returned with a shell now made entirely from recycled plastic and certified under the EU Ecolabel. HAY’s Pack Chair, produced from recycled polymer and wood fibre, offered a further example of material innovation folded into an otherwise straightforward flat-packed design, proving that circularity has become an assumed baseline for new product development.

As a whole, the report positions 3daysofdesign 2026 as a festival that promotes the staying power of furniture over novelty. Whether through Panton’s centenary, Fredericia’s archival deep dive or NAU’s own steadily building presence in Europe, the throughline across Cult’s reflections is that enduring design, made with care and allowed the time to be understood, continues to hold its value long after a festival closes its doors.

Images: Supplied.

Top image: Mesura x Vipp at 3daysofdesign 2026