How far would you go for medieval furniture?

The dresser in the back of the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter bus groaned as Lars Balderskilde drove through the woods near Vejle, a town on a fjord about two and a half hours from Copenhagen.

It was late January, and after Mr. Balderskilde passed a lake full of swans, he stopped at a house where he picked up an old bar cabinet, which he paid for in cash. Then came stops at other houses to collect nesting tables and a mirror. The sun had set by the time he met Nina Toft and Grethe Kock, two sisters, at their mother’s house, whose funeral they had organized earlier that day.

“It’s always emotional, but you have to let it go,” Mrs. Toft told Mr. Balderskilde, who had come to see several pieces in the house.

Mrs. Kock showed him a small clay bird she had made as a girl. “I’ll give you a good deal,” she said jokingly.

Mr Balderskilde did not take the bird with him. But he did fill the van with a teak dresser and bookcase that the sisters’ parents had owned since the 1950s, a desk, a blue PH 5 hanging lamp and a Le Klint 325 floor lamp, a model originally designed to decorate a residence belonging to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr. He paid the sisters $1,800 for the items.

Mrs. Toft and Mrs. Kock had contacted Mr. Balderskilde via email a website on which he offers to buy furniture from people all over Denmark. As he dragged the pieces out of the house, Mr. Balderskilde said to Mrs. Toft, “I have a boutique in New York.”

The store, Lanobais actually in Jersey City, NJ, and sells refurbished Danish Modern furniture, a minimalist style native to Denmark that was typically made with natural materials such as wood, leather, and Danish cord from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Mr Balderskilde, 47, who is Danish, and his husband, David Singh, 48, started the business in late 2015. Mr Balderskilde said that he and his husband, who enjoy going to estate sales, have seen a growing demand for modern furniture, particularly in the wake of “Mad Men,” the highly stylized TV show set largely in the 1960s, whose final season aired in Spring 2015.

In and out style

Danish modern design was influenced by the work of Kaare Klint, an architect, furniture designer and academic known for measuring “paper, books, tableware and people to find the optimal proportions for furniture,” said Christian Holmsted Olesen, head of exhibitions and collections at the Design Museum Denmark in Copenhagen. (Mr. Klint’s brother, Tage Klint, founded the Le Klint brand in 1943.)

By the 1960s, the furniture was associated with the broader mid-century modern style popularized by American designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, who often mixed wood and leather with materials such as metal and plastic. Among the most notable Danish modern pieces of that decade were a pair of teak and leather chairs by Hans Wegner, used in a televised presidential debate in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

The chairs, Mr Balderskilde said jokingly, “almost took the focus off the debate.”

In the 1970s, as decorating tastes shifted to what he described as “plastic fabulous,” Danish modern furniture became less desirable. In Denmark, some pieces were thrown to the curb, according to Mr Balderskilde, who said that many pieces of furniture produced in the style’s heyday no longer exist.

“No one – no one — wanted this stuff,” Mr. Balderskilde added.

By the time Mr. Balderskilde and Mr. Singh founded Lanoba, the demand for furniture from leading Danish modern designers such as Mr. Wegner, Finn Juhl and Grethe Jalk had increased. (Mr Balderskilde said few retailers in the United States offered pieces by mid-range designers such as Johannes Andersen and Omann Jun.) He saw potential in a company that brought unwanted pieces from Danish homes to American buyers, even though he had to travel around Denmark to purchase items from individual sellers.

Gathering an inventory, he said, initially required the kind of recruiting done by fledgling political campaigns. “I talked to a lot of people at the grocery store,” Mr Balderskilde said. “I’ve knocked on so many doors.”

From one house to another

Lanoba’s first sale was a footstool for a psychologist in Manhattan, which Mr. Balderskil delivered to the buyer’s office. The company has since imported thousands of units, he said; most buyers live in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

Mr. Balderskilde now has a network of people in Denmark who know what he is looking for and help spread the word, and he also finds pieces on platforms such as Facebook Marketplace and DBA, a Danish second-hand exchange. He makes three or four buying trips a year (Mr. Singh stays behind to run the store), on which he tries to collect as many as 500 items.

Before being shipped from Denmark to New York in shipping containers, the pieces are stored in a shed owned by Mr. Balderskilde’s older brother, a cabinetmaker who taught him to restore furniture.

The markup on items sold at Lanoba varies — some pieces cost hundreds of dollars, others thousands — and is driven in part by shipping costs to the United States, Mr Balderskilde said. Sellers in Denmark, he said, generally know the provenance of the furniture he buys from them.

“It’s not like ‘American Pickers,'” Mr. Balderskilde said, referring to the reality show about antique sellers buying unwanted items from people often unaware of the items’ potential value. “People know what they have.”

As many offices closed during the pandemic, Mr Balderskilde said, Lanoba was inundated with requests for desks. He was unable to travel to Denmark at the time, so he asked friends and family there to find pieces for him. At one point, the store received a shipment of about 250 desks. “They sold out in five weeks,” Mr Balderskilde said.

Many buyers appreciate that the furniture comes from “real Danish homes,” he said, and many sellers in Denmark like what he called the “saga” of Grandma’s furniture making its way to a Brooklyn brownstone.

The day after Mr. Balderskilde bought pieces from the sisters, he drove to a house in Brylle, a village on the Danish island of Funen, past a wooden windmill, a metal windmill and an abandoned mink farm.

The house, with a for sale sign on the lawn, belonged to Lars Egedal’s parents. Mr. Egedal met with Mr. Balderskilde to show him a desk that Mr. Egedal’s parents had received as a wedding present from his grandparents in the 1960s.

Mr. Egedal said his grandmother was not happy when his parents used the desk, which had a built-in bookshelf, to decorate his brother’s nursery. “But I think she would have been okay with it going to New York,” he said.