HAY (Rolf & Mette Hay)

HAY is a Danish furniture and design brand founded in 2002 by Rolf Hay and Mette Hay, a husband and wife who met while working in the furniture industry. Rolf, born in 1969, and Mette, then twenty-three, built the company around a transparent ambition: to bring the work of their generation’s best designers to a wide audience without compromising on quality. HAY introduced its first collection at the imm furniture fair in Cologne in 2003. Its first store opened in central Copenhagen in 2004.

HAY’s aesthetic weaves Danish craft tradition with Bauhaus rigour and a curiosity about new materials and production processes. Rolf Hay, whose focus is furniture and lighting, cites the playfulness of Charles and Ray Eames and the design discipline of the Bauhaus as twin reference points. Mette Hay leads the accessories range, drawing on colour, pattern, and wit.

Their collaboration with IKEA produced the YPPERLIG collection, launched in 2017 after three years of joint development. The seventy-two-piece collection spanned furniture, textiles, bags, and accessories, pursuing function and visual delight simultaneously. Key pieces included a sofa inspired by a 1950s archetype and made from a single piece of moulded foam, and a widely noted reinterpretation of IKEA’s FRAKTA bag in white-and-forest-green woven fabric. YPPERLIG, Swedish for extraordinary, captured the collection’s intent: museum-calibre design within reach of an everyday household budget.