July 1, 2026·Interview
Philip Seerup
The designer bringing bistro-kitchen tableware home on door handles, corkscrews, and smuggling Gaddafi’s son across the Mexican border.
Philip Seerup’s Service Projects borrows from the places where tableware gets pushed to its limits — bistro kitchens, izakaya counters, canteen lines — and builds it for home use instead. Founded in New York in 2022 and now based in Copenhagen, the brand works almost exclusively in stainless steel, aluminum, and porcelain. The Ice Cream Cup, designed with Laura Bilde, holds gelato as naturally as it holds olives. Next up: the Echo Fruit bowl in September and a steak knife next year. Here he talks door handles, corkscrews, and a book about smuggling Gaddafi’s son across the Mexican border.
Do you have any projects coming up you'd like our readers to know about?
We're launching an Echo Fruit bowl in September — a larger-scale take on our Ice Cream Cup. It's made for the table, like most of what we design, but fits a kitchen island just as well. We're also working on a steak knife for the new year. Very excited about the details that go into such a simple object.
What book have you gifted most?
11.11.11 by Mads Brügger — possibly the best book I've ever read. It's a journalistic documentary following a Danish businessman arrested in Mexico City on 11/11/11, accused of trying to smuggle Gaddafi's son across the border. He spends 533 days in some of Mexico's worst prisons, insisting he's innocent. Brügger investigates, but the deeper he goes, the more he realizes nothing about the man's life adds up, and he starts questioning his own role in the story too.
Where do you go to find peace?
On my runs without any distractions
Who is your forever inspo?
Everyday life, really. Almost all of my inspiration comes from small, ordinary moments — it could be a door handle that suggests the perfect shape for a French press handle (true story), but always with the functionality to match: something that works within a real, everyday context inspires me a lot.
What's the best investment (money, time, habit) you've made?
Founding a company I care about enough that I never question the time I put into it. The work keeps me going and the goals feel worth chasing — I don't regret a second.
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