February. Fredensborg Palace is frozen over, and its green copper roofs are blanched otherworldly white. As bearskin-capped Life Guards march clockwise around the snow-filled courtyard, inside, keeping time, a quiet presence flames the place into vital warmth. Seated in a Louis XV chair upholstered in celadon and confetti-floral lampas silk, Margrethe, former queen regnant of Denmark, seems to embody her own interiors: a model, as Kenneth Clark described Urbino’s court, of ‘harmony and proportion and good manners’. Tall, with observant, clear blue eyes, an elegant updo of snow-white hair and a brace of diamond gobstoppers on her finger, she is still, at 86, every inch a queen. She also has lacquer-red fingernails. What was expected of Marilyn is eye-catching for a monarch. Both, incidentally, were immortalised by Andy Warhol. Now it’s this sovereign’s own artwork that falls into (admittedly abstracted) focus: it’s not Pop art, it’s découpage.
But before that it was simply ‘stick and glue’. ‘We always think we’re very original – I’m sure I’m not,’ she suggests in perfect, pearlescent English. It’s typical of her precise, sober remarks: ‘I just cut out and glued.’ Yet, for all her straightforward practicality, Her Majesty is a maverick. From the late 1970s on, following, she insists, her own discovery, she started decorating everything from tissue boxes to wastepaper baskets with colourful bricolage – developing an approach entirely her own. ‘I did some with my two boys,’ she says, of the present king, Frederik X and Prince Joachim. ‘I think we were trying to make something in a hurry for some birthday present. I found it was such fun that I couldn’t stop.’ ‘Fun’ is a word the queen uses repeatedly. It’s just as well. By the millennium she was cutting and pasting professionally; moonlighting while head of Europe’s most popular monarchy and Denmark’s longest-reigning head of state. She designed découpage scenery first for the ballet adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen in 2000 and the film The Wild Swans (2009), and finally Ehrengard: the Art of Seduction (2023) – a staggering 81 scenes – after a novel by Isak Dinesen, aka Karen Blixen (WoI Jan 2023).
We discuss découpage by that Danish father of fairy tales; intricate, early 19th-century presentation boxes by the Danish novelist Kamma Rahbek; even the comic collaged photograph albums of Her Majesty’s great-great-aunt, Queen Alexandra. ‘Yes, of course!’ she says. ‘But photo albums have never interested me at all!’ My mind strays to another monarch imbued in the theatrical arts: Charles I and the stage sets created by Inigo Jones for his court masques – where, it has been suggested, the totalising world view of absolutism was expressed in linear perspective, all elements converging on the centrally seated sovereign. In this light, the multiple, dissolving perspectives of this queen’s scenery seems to point to a new age of monarchy – perhaps even a fragmented contemporary consciousness. This she would undoubtedly also reject. Trying to draw her on the singular nature of her work, she interjects simply: ‘To me, that’s the whole point [of découpage]: when you can create a world with bits and pieces that belong or don’t belong…’
Out of the fragments arises unity – or, as Her Majesty puts it, a world. The snippets nod to their own past contexts – often back issues of this very magazine: ‘I’ve used and misused The World of Interiors for years,’ she chuckles. Sofas, fabrics, chandeliers, stone and parquet floors, Gothic plasterwork, Classical columns, are all earmarked and extracted – with a ‘fairly long blade’, even for the details, ‘then I glue them on and they get a bit of varnish afterwards’. ‘This one is supposed to be the boudoir of the Grand Duchess,’ she says, gesturing at a green Strawberry Hill Gothick drawing room, ‘but I’ve done it with bits and pieces all over the place and quite a lot of it comes from those houses around Saint Petersburg.’ Other bits of floor need to be patchworked together to fit. The dislocation is both a necessity and the purpose: ‘I try to make the places [so you can] walk into it; you can go up the stairs; you go into there, and you can go into another room there, or is it the same room once you’ve got inside it?’
Certainly Her Majesty shows a deft touch; it’s applied arts rather than mere decoration. ‘I’ve been lucky enough to grow up in rather beautiful old houses and to be interested in interiors… and the history of art since I was very young.’ Indeed, it is her mother, Queen Ingrid – a keen decorator – whom she credits with her aesthetic education: ‘I simply took over where my mother left off.’ Again, in her modesty she slightly dissembles. She produces relentlessly: vestments for Denmark’s Lutheran bishops; cross-stitch cushions for her own apartments. ‘The time people might spend in front of television, I probably do’ – and here she mimes vigorously embroidering – ‘for hours.’ Only last November she re-premièred her sets and costumes for the 2019 revival of Andersen’s The Snow Queen at Copenhagen’s Tivoli Ballet Theatre. She’s even translated Simone de Beauvoir’s novel All Men Are Mortal into Danish, and it is stories that seem to animate her most: ‘[I try] not to follow the text to the letter, but to follow the way it’s done.’ Naturally, she applied the same energy to her set design: ‘I plunged into Ehrengard, and the more we plunged, the more fun it was,’ she explains.
Our interview ends. As I retreat, she follows. ‘That’ – she indicates a large, square, almost photorealistic painting – ‘is a portrait of me and my husband.’ And the backdrop? ‘That’s through here.’ Imperceptibly, we’ve begun a royal tour. Her Majesty seems, tacitly, to want to impress on to the readers of this magazine a view of her interior world; she must in some way identify with them, being one herself. Through a side passage, and a narrow plain white door, is her studio, piled high with copies of WoI. Everywhere we turn, she has made some subtle but studied intervention; whether egg-yolk lacquer, aquamarine silks or broad bands of raspberry-and-cream damask stripes, she always selects the boldest option. These upholsteries? ‘Yes, all me – but the chairs are original.’ Such distinctions reverberate around the queen: practical and romantic, conservator and innovator, old lady and ingénue. Before there’s time to consider this unexpected openness, she’s said goodbye, slipped backwards behind a door and disappeared. It’s noon. Outside, regimented clockwork announces the Changing of the Guard – in the snow.
A version of this article appears in the August 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
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