As crazy as it sounds, when she was growing up in Texas, Casey Larkin Blond was dead-set on becoming a veterinarian. Crazy because her life’s work now — as a fashion designer and proprietor of the beloved international indie fashion boutique Mr. Larkin — could not be more different, but also because it could not be more seemingly inevitable. Larkin was born into the design and fashion industries, a legacy that stretched back to her great-grandmother, a wedding-dress maker from Palermo who emigrated to the U.S. at age two and taught Victor Costa how to sew. Her grandmother was an interior designer, her mom a ceramicist who ran her own indie fashion boutique in Houston the ’80s and ’90s and designed private-label shirts for Neiman Marcus. “I took it all for granted,” Larkin Blond recalled a few weeks back, when we paid a visit to her current home in Copenhagen. “I wanted to work with animals. But I was terrible at school; I tried but couldn’t pass zoology. So I went with the creative field instead.”

Once she re-focused her studies on textile design, her life as she knew it began. She graduated and took off for Paris, where she worked for the likes of Dior and Joseph, then moved to California where she got inspired by the slow food movement and teamed up with then-partner Sasha Duarr to launch an early iteration of Mr. Larkin, as an experimental niche clothing brand that focused on naturally dyed, compostable clothing. She began consulting on sustainable fashion in Denmark, and along the way, fell in love and got pregnant, eventually relocating fully to Copenhagen. The year after she moved and then gave birth, she says, “I had to stop everything. But it made me rethink what I wanted Mr. Larkin to be.” The answer lay in the missed connections she’d observed between the Danish and American fashion scenes — how no one in Denmark had heard of designers like Rachel Comey, and no one in the U.S. knew Stine Goya. She thought, “Why am I not blending these two worlds together?” and with the help of her mom, relaunched Mr. Larkin as an online store, eventually opening physical outposts in Copenhagen and Houston in 2020 and 2022.

The couple’s bedroom in Copenhagen
Lamp by Baptiste Vandaele

These days she’s more focused on her burgeoning in-house clothing line than in cross-pollinating global brands, but that world-blending still forms the core of the Mr. Larkin vibe — what Larkin Blond describes as “a strange little universe” where her Southern roots, West Coast ideals, and Scandinavian influences all converge. It’s also visible in the apartment she shares with her husband, Danish fashion exec Alan Blond, and their two children, in a leafy district of Copenhagen that was once the city’s impoverished countryside and is now home to some of its most quietly historic buildings. The space isn’t dissimilar to her store interiors — spare but colorful, with a curated mix of contemporary handmade design objects and vintage finds — and it’s a negotiation not only between her own disparate interests, but Alan’s as well. “If it was up to him it would be all Dieter Rams, very clean,” she laughs. “Whereas I love texture, rugs, antique textiles. Each time I travel I bring home 3 or 4 objects.”

Both her collecting bug as well as her craft-loving side, she notes, come from her mother, who not only made ceramics but quilts as well, and was a diehard Sheila Hicks fan. “She’s been a collector of antiques forever. I grew up going to estate sales with her; we’ve gone to Paris together to shop. We go to Round Top.” Larkin Blond’s stores and home both act almost as a backdrop for the display of all the objects she loves. Mr. Larkin Copenhagen is anchored by rainbow-airbrushed mirror by Danish artist Anne Nowak, metal artworks by Caia Leifsdotter, and a ceramic-base coffee table by Maria Lenskjold, the latter two whose work is also present in her apartment; the Houston space features a mosaic mirror made by her aunt Katy and rotating exhibitions by local artists. All three spaces are painted entirely white, so as to let the art and objects bring in all the texture and color. “I don’t like spaces to be too designed,” she says.

The dining room, with a table by Snedkersixten and a glimpse at the ceiling moldingsVintage vase, bird by Larkin Blond’s mother, frog by Maria Lenskjold, wall art by Caia Leifsdotter
Artworks by Camilla Skov

White walls also ensure that nothing detracts from the breathtaking historical plasterwork in her home, which is the first thing she and Alan fell in love with when they purchased it three years ago. Its ceilings feature a parade of elaborate decorative relief elements — ribbons, lily pads, fleurs-de-lis, seashells — that Larkin Blond is so enamored with, she’s about to immortalize them in Mr. Larkin’s first runway collection, for spring/summer 2027. “We’re making three-dimensional cotton-poplin flowers based on the ceiling moldings,” she says.

In a way, it’s maybe not as much that her diverse interests have driven the success of Mr. Larkin, but that, in a more overarching sense, everything she creates — like shirts based on her own apartment — is so unabashedly personal. That kind of vision is what lends credibility and soul to an independent fashion brand like hers. “In Denmark, they’re like, ‘What is Mr. Larkin? You’re not very Scandinavian,’” she says. “Everything’s so clean here, but we’re not so polished. Our branding’s not perfect. We still use brown paper bags and handwritten notes. They call us ‘quirky.’” But in Larkin Blond’s world, quirky is the point. “No one can put their finger on it, and that’s what makes it special.” ◆

PHOTOS BY JONATHAN HÖKKLO

Bookends by Shane Gabier The Copenhagen store, with a coffee table by Maria Lenskjold Mirror in the Copenhagen store by Anne NowakVintage vases, vases by Canoa, and a metal artwork by Caia Leifsdotter