Behind The Limitless Pursuits of Dansk Pepper Mill Collectors

In Alex Severin and Maren Lankford’s 18th floor, one bedroom, Upper West Side apartment you’ll find a grand piano, a cat named Dorian, and nearly 50 pepper mills.

“They’re little wooden sculptures,” Maren told me over Zoom, referencing the two floating shelves in her backdrop, each lined end-to-end with their wooden Dansk pepper mills—a collection undoubtedly worth thousands.

“Out of context, you have no idea what tip of what iceberg you’re seeing,” Alex said, also referring to the pepper mills.

It turns out, even with context, nobody entirely understands this iceberg—including us, the company that makes these pepper mills.

For Alex and Maren, their curiosity began at a furniture store in Copenhagen, where they spotted what they thought was a sculpture.

“I had no idea what it was,” he said, “It was incredibly elegant, but had no clear function.” A conversation with a salesperson brought some clarity: The eight inch-tall, spiked, teak sculpture standing before them was the work of Jens Quistgaard—a Danish designer who crafted more than 4,000 products for Dansk. This wooden object is one of those products—it’s also, technically, a pepper mill.

“The salespeople were pretty amused,” Alex continued, “They were like: ‘You guys are Americans. We don’t really have these here.’”

Which tracks—Quistgaard’s pepper mills, like most Dansk products, were primarily distributed throughout the United States during their original production run from the late 1950s into the early ’70s—but didn't sell, as the Americans ultimately passed on the befuddling piece of pepper machinery.

But the couple couldn’t stay away for long. A few weeks later, while in search of a present for Alex’s upcoming birthday, Maren turned to eBay in hopes of tracking down the mill that caught her partner’s eye in Copenhagen. Immediately, she found dozens of Quistgaard’s pepper mills—and many more questions, like: How many are there? Why are there so many designs? And where are the rest of these things?

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Let’s first acknowledge the one certainty surrounding Quistgaard’s pepper mills: They’re especially enjoyed by architects, designers, and creatives. Per Alex, an architect turned architectural photographer, the attraction’s rooted in the context in which Quistgaard was asked to create.

“There’s an intensity to how much he interrogated how a functional object could look a ton of different ways,” Alex said, “and using something, like a pepper mill, as a greater outlet for creativity is a very seductive thing.”

Quistgaard would agree. According to Stig Guldberg, author of the biography, Jens Quistgaard: The Sculpting Designer, the Dansk designer found crafting pepper mills reminiscent of both “recess time” and the “chiseling, hollowing-out, and forming” of sculpting.

Other designers are drawn to the quality in which Quistgaard’s pepper mills were manufactured. Often featuring high-grade teak and Peugeot-manufactured metal grinders, the original mills produced by Dansk were built to withstand generations of use. For Brent Buck, a Brooklyn-based architect who owns potentially the world’s most complete Quistgaard pepper mill collection—a 70-strong grouping possibly worth $100,000—this durability and craftsmanship is what separates these sculptures from many of today’s products.

“I restored all the pepper mills myself,” Brent told me. “Imagine today’s world producing something that 65 years from now you could restore to look amazing. I can’t think of something that’s sold today that could do that.”

Naturally, the fandom surrounding these pepper mills led to a collective interest in their backstory. Unfortunately, the uncertainty of their history begins with even the most basic of questions. Like, as Maren once wondered: How many pepper mills did Quistgaard design?

Well, it doesn’t help that Quistgaard, himself, wasn’t sure how many he made. Or that he didn’t care. “I’m a designer, not an accountant,” the Dane told his biographer.

Dansk also doesn’t know. (An unfortunate byproduct of the company’s numerous ownership changes has been the loss of historical data and design archives).

To make things more complicated, the pepper mills never received names. Strictly referenced by their three-digit model numbers in Dansk’s original marketing materials, there’s no clear and obvious language to use when discussing and comparing Quistgaard’s designs.

This lack of basic parameters can be maddening for collectors—a problem which Alex puts best: “It feels important to get a sense of what the boundaries are for this thing. Like if we have 20 of these mills, do we still need a hundred more?”

Luckily, some pepper mill fans took it upon themselves to add clarity where they could. According to Brent, who primarily collected Quistgaard’s mills during the early to mid 2010s, much of his knowledge surrounding these things can be attributed to Mark Perlson’s Danish Pepper. Published in 2008, Perlson’s book was the first work dedicated to profiling Quistaard’s work—and one that ultimately shed light on critical pepper mill plot points, like how many were made (roughly 70).

Around the same time Brent was collecting, collector Todd Perdanzi created Peppermill Wiki—a barebones webpage that sought to “organize and make available to the public information about pepper mills. Not just any pepper mills, but mostly Dansk pepper mills designed by Jens Quistgaard.”

By the time Alex and Maren began collecting Quistgaard’s pepper mills in 2015, Peppermill Wiki was shut down. Only accessible through screenshots harvested by the perfectly named internet archive, TheWaybackMachine, the American couple were limited in how much they could glean from the internet about their new wooden obsessions.

With time, Alex and Maren pieced together their own understanding of Quistgaard’s work. Like Brent, they read Danish Pepper. Then they began tracking down old Dansk catalogs and advertisements—scanning the copy for any sort of insight that could bring them closer to both the pepper mills and Quistgaard’s history.

All the while, the couple’s collection grew and grew. Through shrewd eBay purchasing and the occasional thrift store find, Alex and Maren built a collection which Maren described as “complete, except for the super rare ones.” In less humble terms, this means 46 pieces.

Then COVID hit. Stuck inside their New York City apartment with their cat, piano, and shelves of wooden sculptures, they devised an all-encompassing project to preserve their sanity: Creating a modern vision of Peppermill Wiki.

“Most interactions we have with other collectors are people who inherit collections—or find something in an attic while cleaning out their great aunt’s house—and don’t entirely realize what they have,” Maren told me. “So we wanted to create the resource that we wish existed in 2015—back when we first discovered Quistgaard and were just so eager for more information about him.”

And that they have: Combining Alex’s photography and Maren’s background in museum studies, the two have fundamentally created a digital Quistgaard pepper mill exhibit that’s both packed with knowledge and—like the mills, themselves—visually appealing.

That said, they’re going to need to update their website because we—the team at Food52 and Dansk—are happy to announce that we’re relaunching three of Quistgaard’s most signature pepper mill designs: No. 826, No. 833, and No. 831. (Which, as you’ll notice, have also each received Danish names to match their design.) As for how this impacts the number of mills produced, we’re not sure. Again, like Quistgaard, we’re designers, not accountants.

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Which pepper mills should we bring back next? Let us know in the comments below!