Kinraden

Kinraden makes jewellery in which wood, polished by the rules of diamond cutting, takes the place of precious stones.

The idea came from Sarah Emily Müllertz, an architect with a degree from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Sarah did not want to deal with stones from mines and was looking for something to replace them. On one of her architectural projects she came across mpingo, the African blackwood that has been used for centuries to make clarinets and oboes. This tree grows in a Tanzanian forest protected by the World Wide Fund for Nature. It is so dense and dark that after cutting and polishing it looks like black stone. Kinraden buys up the offcuts left over from the production of wind instruments and turns them into unusual jewellery details. In a photo you cannot tell the mpingo inserts from black stone, but pick up an earring or a ring and you realise how warm they are.

The metal here is second-hand too: everything is made from recycled gold and silver. The range includes earrings and rings, pendants and bracelets, necklaces and chokers, brooches and hairpins. All the pieces are very architectural: the Doric earrings recall a cross-section of an ancient column, the Isadora and Hanna rings are assembled from alternating strips of gold, silver and mpingo, and the Bricks collection repeats the brickwork pattern of Copenhagen façades, with square-cut and baguette-cut sapphires set into it.

The brand opened its first shop in Copenhagen on 1 May 2024, and by the summer of 2025 it had already been redone and reopened. Inside stands a huge counter in a deep blue, about ten metres long, and in it and on it the jewellery is displayed almost like museum collections. Speaking of museums, right here, in the Kinraden boutique, they hold exhibitions of contemporary Danish artists.

The shop sits on Møntergade in the historic centre of Copenhagen. The Round Tower and Copenhagen's main shopping street are some two hundred metres away, so it would be a sin not to drop in!