Dinner at Jacob and Pia Marie’s: The Art of Conversation

Our last night in Copenhagen was our best. That’s because we met such interesting people and learned all about their lives at an intimate dinner party held in a spacious art-filled apartment in the city. Jacob Termansen and Pia Marie Molbech are a glamorous and successful couple who photograph top hotels together around the world. They create coffee-table books showing luscious photos of the properties and of high-end homes. He shoots the photos using a 6 x 8 format camera and Pia Marie styles the sets. It’s a wonderful arrangement that brings them to Singapore, the US and to this art-filled apartment at different times of the year. They also visit hotels on islands around the world for their shoots.

I sat next to an architect named Torsten who designs buildings in Denmark, Greenland, and Kuwait. He told me about the 18 families who run the gulf country–there are only about 700,000 natives and more than two million guest workers who handle the work. He said the competition is tough–there are a lot of hungry architects from Egypt, Pakistan and other places so he has to work for much less there. But he likes the work and has many projects under way. He does city planning and large developments.

Jacob, a tall bearded man with an easy smile, showed us around his the large apartment where original artwork filled every wall, and the ceilings were about 12 feet high. On one shelf stood an assortment of phaluses, from nine inches all the way up to three feet. Down on the floor was a cast of an upturned pudenda, looking appropriate there with all of the penises on the shelf above. In each room the artwork called out at you, it was attention grabbing and one-of-a-kind throughout.

We also met a woman who works at a Copenhagen free daily newspaper. It’s one of four such freebies in a viciously cut-throat market where the press not only gives the papers away, but home delivers more than 500,000 copies to nearly every household in Denmark. “We are losing about $200,000 per day on this,” she said, “but we have to do it so that the outsiders (a company from Iceland) doesn’t gain a foothold here.”

The mark of a good dinner party is how long you stay seated at the table. With our vigorous conversation and the interesting company, we sat from 8 pm til 1:30 in the morning. It was a fine way to end this visit to Denmark, a country whose people have proved to be among the most dynamic and interesting in the world!