Over the past few years, the cornerstone of our advice to young design students has always been: “Take good images of your work.” But a new collection of furniture by Danish designer Maria Bruun seems to ask an interesting, if thorny, counterpoint: “Do good images confer a greater value upon the pieces being shown?” “Good images today have more value than we have ever seen before,” explains Bruun. “Through curated photography we can invite the consumers into a unique universe and give an extra dimension to the furniture.” That’s why, for her latest collection, the Danish designer teamed up with fellow Royal ​D​anish ​A​cademy of ​D​esign alum Pernille Andersen, a set designer with a strong background in photography. Both designers came at the collaboration with a desire to strip everything down to a minimum and focus on the idea of “non-space.”

“By using a minimum of props, almost nothing, the viewer is forced to see what man​y​ barely notice — the space around the objects,” says Andersen. “Light is an essential vehicle in photography — to direct attention to the subtle sensing material surfaces. It is almost like a painter using a brush sculpting light in space.” What the viewer notices in this case is a collection defined by something the designers call sculptural minimalism. The Mirror Mirror collection is all light, oak-framed circles, elongated ovals, and angled combinations to reflect several sides of one small space, while the Bigfoot collection — five side tables in solid ash wood and a dining table in solid oak — has massive legs like a sophisticated version of plastic toddler furniture, with sloping lines that call out for you to run your hand over the wood. ​Take a look at some of our favorite images from the collection below.