In Residence with

Isabella Rose Davey

Copenhagen | Photography by Tine Bek

We sit down with Isabella to learn more about the home she's built in Copenhagen, and how a life spanning fashion, literature and travel has shaped the way she lives.

Meet Isabella Rose Davey, a woman who moves between two very different worlds. By day, she is COO of Copenhagen Fashion Week, alongside it, she writes as Contributing Editor at Ark Journal, and this year founded Conch Books, a literary collective built from her own appetite for reading. Australian-born, raised between Ireland and Australia, with her mother's family from Aotearoa, she has spent the past several years building a life at the centre of Scandinavian culture - one that plays out as loudly on a runway schedule as it does over a stack of books at home.

Walk into her Christianshavn apartment and you're in a different register entirely. It is not a showroom. Books are stacked rather than styled. Danish design classics sit beside a sheepskin from New Zealand, a painting from her father, prints traded and gifted over years of globe-trotting. Everything in the apartment has provenance, and she can tell you exactly which trip, or which friend, is behind almost everything in the room.

On a recent trip to Copenhagen for 3 days of design, I met Isabella. And while we had only connected on email, her energy and openness made me feel like we had hung out a dozen times before. Her instinct for objects with meaning led us to gift Isabella one of our rugs, which now sits at home with her in Copenhagen. For BAYA, which thinks about longevity and story in its own pieces, there was something fitting about the rug finding its way into a home where everything has a reason for being there.

We sat down with Isabella to talk about the life she's built in Copenhagen, what she surrounds herself with, and what she still carries from the other side of the world.

You move between two quite different worlds - the fast, public pace of Copenhagen Fashion Week and the slower, private world of books and writing. Do those two sides feed each other, or do you keep them separate?

Absolutely. I am someone who has always sought inspiration from all projects I am working across and all organisations I have worked with, and I can see the crossovers in almost all perspectives of my professional and personal life: friends have become collaborators, one idea might come to fruition across another thought, a project might be brought forth with another brand entirely.

Collaboration is the future, and I feel this has come to apply with all these roles I am undertaking. One feeds the other.

"I can see the crossovers in almost all perspectives of my professional and personal life: friends have become collaborators, one idea might come to fruition across another thought, a project might be brought forth with another brand entirely."

Your apartment reads like a personal archive - everything has a story. When you bring something new into the home, what has to be true about it for it to earn its place?

I feel like I have spent my life as a perennial immigrant, having lived in Sydney, Dublin, Canberra, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, London and Copenhagen, and with my family spread across the UK, the USA, Australia and Aotearoa. 

Suddenly everything you own can be a weight when you move around a lot so you begin to think about the pieces in your home in a different way. On the other hand, when you are an immigrant, your home is not only a sanctuary, it's a reminder of who you are, so having talismans of nostalgia becomes a vital aspect.

I love my greenstone from my aunt Ruth that hangs in the bedroom, or even the magnet from the fish market in Sydney, the tea towels my mum got me from Auckland. Having a home that means something to you in all corners of the space gives it this emotional veil that I very much have sought to create.

Tell us about where the BAYA rug has landed in your apartment. How does it sit alongside the pieces you've already collected?

The beautiful Norfolk rug in Ivory has landed pride of place in our bedroom, at the foot of our bed. I have found there is no greater luxury than stepping out of bed in the morning and having the plushness of this rug greet your toes.

"I have found there is no greater luxury than stepping out of bed in the morning and having the plushness of this rug greet your toes."

You moved to Copenhagen in 2019 and have built a career immersed in Scandinavian design and fashion since. What has that immersion changed about the way you see, choose, and live with objects?

When Danes design, they are thinking about function over form, honesty of material and simplicity of design. This has huge overtones with Japanese design philosophies, but the Danes have carried these principles and built clothing, accessories, furniture and homes with such a distinctive style and in keeping with these values.

I have really tried to consider these aspects in all my own work, and also their innate ability to cross-pollinate various creative industries. The longer we are in Copenhagen it truly feels like a village, and the interconnectedness is fantastic.

With family ties to Aotearoa and a childhood split between Ireland and Australia, what do you feel you still carry from the Southern Hemisphere, even after so many years building a life in the north?

The love of not wearing shoes! I think there is a friendliness in the southern hemisphere Ben and I really miss at times; that and the sunny weather. When it's minus 5 and we are in arctic snow gear trying to cycle our bikes in a blizzard, thoughts of swimming at Devonport beach with my family brings a tear to my eye.

You founded Conch Books this year, alongside your role at Copenhagen Fashion Week and your writing for Ark Journal. What drove you to build a literary community on top of an already full creative life?

I call Conch Books a collective celebrating books and printed matter, and its inception was very much with the everyday reader in mind. I want to take books off the pedestal they sometimes sit on and cultivate opportunities for them to integrate into our lives more.

We will be releasing an audiobook app at the start of 2027: how we read is shifting but we want to highlight the mutual wonders of the printed page as much as listening to a book can allow us to integrate literature into the lives we lead.

You've spoken about the home as a kind of identity when you're someone who has moved around often. What does home mean to you now, in this apartment, at this point in your life?

Home to me means happiness on so many levels. I share my apartment with my incredible boyfriend Ben, and the sheer joys of drinking a coffee in bed, reading a book on the sofa, cooking a delicious curry (Ben) and eating it in the kitchen with the windows open (me), know no bounds when I am home.

It is always the simple things we remember best, and for me the concept of home is where we set it. I have been asked over the years where is home to you, and for me it is less a place and more a feeling.

If we had one day in Copenhagen, where should we eat?

I would absolutely take you to Schønnemann’s for a slice of Danish tradition. An open-faced pickled herring sandwich with a thimble of aquavit!

Isabella's Rug

Norfolk in Ivory