How to Create a Global Community Space
Kaave Pour helped launch Space 10, one of the most pivotal design institutions of the 21st century. Now, he's moved on to bigger and better things.
Hi everyone,
We’re deep into fall in NYC, though we seem to be wafting between summer and winter, depending on the day. But enough about the weird weather. Next week is Halloween, when the city is at its most creative. Dogs dress in their finest, people get wild, and a trip to Greenwood Cemetery becomes the hottest ticket in town. In honor of this strange, beautiful city’s commitment to bringing together communities of all kinds, today’s send is on building intentional spaces for gathering and collaboration.
I hope you enjoy it. As always, if there is a creator you think we should highlight, contact me at slowghost@substack.com or in the comments.
~Laura
Slow Ghost logo: Tyler Lafreniere. Image courtesy of Space 10.
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The Dream Baby Press Writing Club is back at a Brooklyn Burger King near you (and this time features writer Mary H.K. Choi).
If you’re in NYC and looking for Halloween plans: Comedian Julio Torres is throwing a costume party that looks absolutely legendary, with co-hosts Bowen Yang, Natasha Lyonne, and John Cameron Mitchell. A portion of the proceeds will support G.L.I.T.S, a Black trans-led organization fighting systemic discrimination.
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The David Prize, which awards five New Yorkers working on ideas for extraordinary change with $200K, no strings attached.Â
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The Art of Community Building Goes Global — and Back Again
Image via the Danish Design Awards
Kaave Pour is a Copenhagen-based creative entrepreneur. As the former co-founder, CEO, and Creative Director of SPACE10, he led the acclaimed research and design lab, incubator, and events space until its closure in 2023. Kaave’s practice stands at the intersection of design, culture, and technology and has included collaborations with Apple, MIT, the UN, and IKEA (a main partner of Space 10). Kaave now masterminds several new projects, including a restaurant, a farmhouse and retreat, and a new European design and technology company centered on building the home of the future.
Slow Ghost: what are you working on now?
Kaave: After we ended Space 10, it was the first time I didn't have a huge team that reported to me in eight years. I spent time with my daughter and friends and decided to live for myself. Now, a friend of mine, who's a filmmaker, and I have a new space. Last November, we bought a restaurant, and it's been full – full of people and fun and memories – ever since. It's a different business than what I've been used to operating within — everything from hiring the team to designing it to choosing the tiles and the menu. Now, my partners will be the restaurant – and the head chef will run it from there. But I still take a shift occasionally and go out on the floor, which is quite fun. I'm also moving from one place to another within the city into a house we are renovating and painting.
Space 10
You certainly are busy.
We are also renovating a farmhouse in the middle of a forest in Sweden. But that's a side project that isn't commercial. I'm also slowly gearing up to launch my next long-term venture. With these projects, what I'm doing is a little bit like a window. I knew I had a year where I could have fun with things. Where I could be my own partner without anyone expecting anything. No decisions had to be floated with anyone other than me. And they are almost done, so I'm starting to move back into reality.
Can anyone visit your restaurant?
Yes! It's called Graziano, and it's Tuscan-inspired. We wanted to create something of a low-key home away from home. It's fully booked for two or three months at a time and quite busy. We just got a good review and then had 1200 bookings come through in one night. We also sold 25% of the restaurant to twenty-five friends and family partners. Some friends who have a beer brand bought a percentage. Some who run a bakery bought another percentage. My wife bought a percentage. A friend who runs an eyewear company called Flatlist bought a percentage. It's a community business in that sense. It's not what will make my retirement easy, but it gives me a lot.
Was it always your dream to open a restaurant?
My cousin and I, with whom I'm running it, have talked about doing a restaurant since he was four. He is now a chef and has been in the industry for a long time. He wanted to make great food but was, I think, fed up with the old industry standards. Here, 80 to 90% of our staff are badass women who left way better-paying positions because the culture was toxic.Â
But one key part of it was to create something more local. A community home away from home. I took a lot of what I learned from Space 10 in terms of building a business based around storytelling values, a way to operate things easier, and see if that could be applied to something completely different. In the end, I'm more of an entrepreneur. Selling something new gets me going. But this also fits into my longer-term focus, where I'm trying to do projects related to the home. Whether I do keynotes, advisory, startups, or invest, it's always with home as a thread. These small local eating and drinking establishments are becoming an extension of the living room. And the knowledge I will get from this can also be applied to some of my bigger endeavors that perhaps are beyond my little locale.
You're working on so much, it's hard to imagine you have bigger projects up your sleeve.
It's such a massive project. But I see it all as one project. When we stopped Space 10, at that point, we were consistently running maybe 40 to 80 projects in parallel. We were 40 in Copenhagen and 140 full-time externally. I've always had a lot of projects going, but it doesn't feel overwhelming if you organize it as one narrative or with one focus. But if I did things in a completely different area, I would feel overwhelmed. Suddenly, it's a new mindset and new knowledge that you need. But people can do much more than we believe if it's within the same space. We are just stretched so thin across so many things we need to be good at.
Birgitta Wolfgang Bjørnvad
How did you conceptualize Space 10?
It started with two of the other co-founders, Carl and Simon, who had met the CEO of IKEA for another project. He later became the CEO of INA group, the mothership that owns IKEA and others. It was his task to restructure the whole shebang. He understood he needed to look at the business differently and how IKEA acted in terms of being part of a larger network and attracting a younger audience. He asked Simon and Carla if they had ideas for how to do that. "We don't, but we can design a setup where we can find out," they told him. He came back and said, "Okay, think about it." Then they called me, and we had ten months to develop a model for how IKEA could work with innovation. They may have expected we would develop some internal setup for which we would be hired, but we said, "We don't want to be employees. But we would like to work with you within our own company." Then they said yes. I'm still surprised today that they did.Â
It was quite a small scale, beginning with four people, but over time, the method we developed was validated in terms of bringing brand and cultural impact. After three years, we decided to expand with business impact and helped form and develop strategies to invest in ventures and design new products. And then it just grew from there. It was not a calculated pitch with a curve. Part of it was good timing. Then, I took over as CEO of Creative two or three years after we started to grow. We realized we couldn't do everything by intuition; we had to be more strategic. That's where we ended up having a larger footprint in terms of awareness and working across markets and countries. But it definitely was timing.
It was such a pivotal space. Are going to continue that work with your new project.
Right now, I'm still defining. I've taken on an advisory role for a few companies and invested in others, but I want to make something my own again. At Space 10, we did great when it came to creating an indirect impact by forming broader conversations around design. We had over a thousand job applications a year for a team of 30. But our ability to make concrete, tangible change depended on the organization we worked with, which I now see. But I don't want to work as a proxy anymore or be in a situation where someone else needs to say yes to confirm things. So, my new company will be a design company focused on imagining and building a "new home" and primarily centered on explorations and ventures. Not so much the studio model where we would work with companies.
My goal is to build primarily technology-driven products that enable healthy, sustainable living. I'm also working on a heat pump and a new safety sensor, a home insurance kit and a new scale that can measure health, a laundry machine that doesn't require a lot of water, and a way to purify your water through techniques while also conserving it.
The Ideal City: Exploring Urban Futures, by Space 10 and Gestalten
These sound really interesting.
I'm trying to move into hardware without it being phones. A lot of innovation has been focused on the phone for the last two decades, and we are at a tipping point where the home will be a new battleground for design. There's such potential right now, especially in industries like furniture lighting. Most of the real change is in home hardware, which hasn’t been changed for so long. A heat pump is a good innovation from a climate point of view, but they look like shit and are impossible to operate. My next move is to conceptualize these mechanisms so that you can create a better experience and design around it and make an R&D lab for my own products, not necessarily for others.
Space 10 Mexico City Pop-up
Back at Space 10, you did such interesting work with both global pop-ups and innovative materials. It really felt like you were at the cutting edge.
One project I was close to pursuing but might not be the right person to do is a company called Made Again. I had the idea of creating a platform marketplace and a label where all these excellent materials with so much potential but don't have the scale could live. These groups must also establish connections with those who should buy the materials. I wanted to create a value chain around it from the facilities to process, gather, or invest in these separate categories of products. Then, make a few products within the company to show the world through design weeks and sell them.Â
There should be a focus on Europe first since they're the biggest sustainable, recyclable materials marketplace. However, Nike, IKEA, or anyone who wants to work with these materials could use the label to validate the customers and show that these materials are appropriately sourced, recyclable, and sustainable. But to make this successful, you need someone great with materials and a business expert to run it. A lot of this is a proper supply chain business. Finding companies and buying them is easy and fascinating, but this will not be my forte.
Photo by Kasper Kristoffersen
There's such an untapped world with these materials, from spider silk to shoes made from bananas.
Yeah. When you think about it, it's fucking crazy how these materials are being developed because it's the complete opposite of how materials usually would be created. Typically, it's super centralized, massive in scale, huge in volume, and bad for everyone, both the body wearing it and the climate. But these smaller players need a little bit of the same as what media or brands have seen with platforms or what social media has done for storytelling. Where it's democratized for a lot more. Or what Shopify has done for e-commerce. Who is that player that will be the Shopify of innovative materials without necessarily having to reinvent every single step of the journey?
Pieces of Home, Space 10 Mexico City
But if they could create it, it would be such a game-changer.
In the EU, one of the biggest topics is paper waste. If you could take it and repurpose it into new material, you could tap into a vast amount of material. For something like apple waste, it's almost more of a niche material company, which also should exist. It will be fun to see how those two compete, the ones who use plastic or paper or, you know, some of the groups recycling food and vegetables. Then, some of the more experimental ones are as much about the storytelling as the volume.Â
Follow Kaave Pour.
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Slow Ghost is a newsletter covering the next wave in culture, brought to you by writer Laura Feinstein.Â