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Great photographs of your apartment will often lead a potential tenant to choose your apartment over another rental. Especially when you are trying to rent out property over the internet, photographs prove that the space is a real apartment and not an internet scam. But more than that, good photographs will prove that the apartment is also a livable home and serve as a warm invitation.

But interior spaces are some of the most difficult subjects to photograph and when you are photographing your apartment you will be facing a subject that can feel “empty” or “lifeless.” Here are a few tips to combat a lifeless photo and help you welcome tenants over the internet into your home.

Setting the Scene:
The first step is to clean the apartment. Clean everything. Make your bed, straighten the rugs and curtains, put away the magazines, hide the garbage can, and put the toilet seat down. You might even have to put away things that aren’t usually put away. Less is more when it comes to décor to help a room not appear “cluttered” in a photo. On the other hand, the apartment should seem like someone lives there, not totally empty, so set the kitchen table or put a vase of flowers on the nightstand.

Lighting the Scene:
Most cameras are designed to take photos outdoors and indoor spaces are just too dark to look good. Natural light from outside is best, but cameras are attracted to bright windows like moths to flames and everything else in the room will be darkened. Try to let the light in through the window without actually having the window in the shot. Don’t use the flash, unless you have a good flash that you can bounce off a wall or ceiling (if you don’t know what this means, don’t use your flash). Turn on every lamp in the room for a nice warm glow, but by all means, avoid fluorescent lighting, which can cast an alien green light in photos or make your apartment look like a hospital.

What to Shoot:
Everything. The more the merrier. You can always delete the ones that don’t look good or you can send them all to us and we will pick out the best photos of your apartment for the website. Shoot every room in your house. Take close ups of your best pieces of furniture and decorative art. Small architectural details or decorations may seem insignificant but can help represent the design style of the apartment. If you have a great view, photograph it. Great sunsets? Photograph one. If your apartment is in a historic building, photograph the exterior as well.

How to Shoot:
Steadying your camera is crucial. Even if you set the perfect scene and light it well, a blurry photo is useless. If you have a tripod, use it. If you don’t, try to rest the camera on a table or flat surface or steady your hand against the wall. Most basic cameras don’t have a wide enough lens to capture an entire room, so you’ll have to back into a corner or shoot a room through a doorway. Try the room from many different angles and all corners and doorways. Don’t always take the photos from eye level. Crouch down or stand on a stool for different perspectives, but try to have as little of the ceiling in the shot as possible.

Let the Room Be the Star:
People like to rent an apartment that is empty—that is, without other people living there, so photograph your apartment without yourself or your family members in the shot. Watch out for mirrors! A self-portrait of you with a camera in the bathroom mirror won’t help sell your apartment.

To Summarize:
• Clean the apartment
• Add a few small decorative touches
• Shoot during the day when it’s bright, but not too sunny
• Photograph every room
• Take lots of photos and choose the best

If you want to list your apartment with Red Apple Apartments, follow the above advice and send your beautiful apartment photographs to info@redappleapartments.com. We’ll get back to you right away and hopefully you’ll have tenants in no time at all.

At Red Apple Apartments we pride ourselves on our service and we do everything we can to make your stay in our apartment and your entire visit to Copenhagen as comfortable and relaxing as possible. While we want you to feel at home in our accommodation, we also recognize that you might want to get out and do some sightseeing during your stay. So if you decide to leave the comfort of your apartment, we have created a city guide to help you plan your excursions.

The guide has information on city history, local cultural attractions, recreational activities, day trips around the area, and general dining, shopping and transportation information. Everything is on our website so you can plan ahead or decide on something to do once you get to your apartment (all of our properties include internet access).

Check out our city guide to Copenhagen or learn about any of our other destinations and pack your bags!

About Helsinki

About Oslo

About Reykjavik

About Stockholm

The city of Copenhagen is already gearing up to host the World Outgames in July 2009. The Outgames is a major sporting event for the gay and lesbian community and also a human rights conference and cultural celebration.

Copenhagen’s reputation as a tolerant and fun city helped it win the bid to host the Outgames and Scandinavia’s excellent record of gender equality and respect further qualifies the region to host an event of this magnitude. The city anticipates over 6,000 athletic participants and 10,000 foreign spectators for the sporting events and thousands more visitors for the cultural events and human rights conference.

The participants and visitors will fill Copenhagen’s streets for a full week at the end of July and many tourists will extend their stay both before and after the event. The organizers hope that the Outgames will have a lasting effect on the city, not only by exposing Copenhagen to new visitors who will enjoy the city’s historic attractions and comfortable feel, but also by leaving a more serious impression as a source of inspiration for social change that will radiate out from the city into the global community.

Red Apple Apartments is happy to have one of its cities chosen to host such a great event, but we also recognize the need for accommodation solutions with so many visitors descending on the city at one time. If you are planning on attending the World Outgames next year, we still have several apartments in Copenhagen available for the week. We anticipate being fully booked for that week, however, so we ask apartment owners in Copenhagen to contact us if their apartment is available during the months of July and August. We hope to match as many World Outgames visitors with as many apartment owners as we can through our listing and booking service. We hope to make as many people feel at home as we can in the gracious city of Copenhagen next summer.

For more on the World Outgames, go to www.copenhagen2009.org.

To book or list an apartment with Red Apple Apartments, send an e-mail to info@redappleapartments.com or call +46 763 416 730.

You may have noticed that our home page is getting crowded with flags. That’s because Red Apple Apartments is now represented in all of the Nordic countries with new apartments recently listed in Stockholm, Helsinki and Oslo. We are excited to be serving these important capitals. Each Scandinavian capital offers history, art and nature in abundance and our apartments are always located either right in the heart of the city center or with easy access to city attractions and amenities.

Our lists are also growing longer in Copenhagen and Reykjavik with several new apartments added to these established cities.

We’re excited to continue to find affordable luxurious apartments in these five dynamic cities. Check the website often for new arrivals as many of our apartments are being booked as soon as they are listed. And if you are an apartment owner in one of these cities, please contact us at info@redappleapartments.com if you want to see your property listed on our website.

Sunday’s edition of the U.K.’s Observer featured an article about an “Instant Weekend” to Reykjavik, and as proof that Red Apple Apartments is becoming a household name in Reykjavik accommodation, the article recommends us for finding an affordable and comfortable place to stay in Iceland’s capital. Of course this is no surprise to anyone who has already stayed in one of our apartments in Reykjavik or Copenhagen, but now you don’t have to take our word for it…a trusted name in travel journalism has spoken!

If you want to take the Observer’s advice and make a spontaneous visit to Reykjavik, please check out our list of apartments in Reykjavik at www.redappleapartments.com or contact us at info@redappleapartments.com and we’ll help you find a place to call home for the weekend…or longer if you fall in love with Iceland.

As an international company, we have an international staff and each of us brings our culture, experience and talents to Red Apple Apartments to make it a truly global company ready to serve customers all over the world. We currently have staff in four different countries and today we’d like to introduce you to our management team, located in Sweden.

Ragnar Saevarsson
Managing Director
ragnar@redappleapartments.com

Ragnar is co-founder of Red Apple Apartments. He holds Master’s degrees in Entrepreneurship and International Marketing & Brand Management from Lund University in Sweden. He held several management positions in sales and marketing before starting Red Apple Apartments. He is at home in the virtual world of the internet and has a keen eye for design. He speaks fluent English and has a good grasp of Danish and Swedish. Ragnar is well-traveled and places an importance on health, fitness and recreation in his life. He has two children and lives with his wife, Sesselía Birgisdóttir, in Lund, Sweden.

Sesselía Birgisdóttir
Marketing Director
sesselia@redappleapartments.com

Sesselía is co-founder of Red Apple Apartments. She has two Master’s degrees—International Marketing & Brand Management and Managing People, Knowledge & Change—from Lund University in Sweden. She worked for many years in the publishing industry in marketing and sales and brings her creative skills to Red Apple Apartments, where she also exercises her talents in public relations. She lives in Sweden with her husband, Ragnar Saevarsson, and has a daughter and stepson. She divides her time between work, family and travel—sometimes doing all three at once. She speaks fluent English and Icelandic and some Swedish and Faroese. She has made several attempts to learn Spanish and has sincere hopes to get it down one day.

Jennifer Pemberton
Communications Manager
jennifer@redappleapartments.com

Jennifer is from the United States and holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. She has taught writing and literature to university students in the U.S. and China and serves as our web editor and writer, among her many tasks at Red Apple. She has worked as an editor for university publications, a history magazine, and an expedition travel company. Her work as a travel writer has taken her to the Antarctic and Shanghai, where she worked on writing an online travel guide to China. She has recently moved to Sweden, where her husband is a Master’s student at Lund University. She is passionate about travel and the outdoors and is an avid camper and backpacker. She speaks English fluently and knows the language intimately. She also knows some basic Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, and she can say hello and thank you in at least 15 other languages.

Lyazzat Salikova
Customer Relations Manager
lyazzat@redappleapartments.com

Lyazzat has a Master’s degree in Entrepreneurship from Lund University in Sweden and her business ideas and customer relations skills are valued at Red Apple Apartments. Originally from Kazakhstan, her knowledge of the global community comes from working for the United Nations and several U.S. government development agencies. She has lived in the U.K., Germany and Indonesia and her passion for travel has taken her to over 30 other countries. She is fluent in Russian, English and Kazakh and picked up quite a bit of German. Her Russian enables her to understand many Slavic languages and she hopes to add Swedish to her list soon. She lives in Sweden and, when she’s not touring Europe on the back of her husband’s Harley, she enjoys the comforts of home—reading, cooking and relaxing.

It is always a nice feeling to finish first. According to the English lifestyle magazine Monocle, Copenhagen ranks top for two categories in society and living:

• The best city in the world for quality of life.
• The best city in the world for design.

The magazine has established its top 25-list to indentify the cities in the world that give priority to the joy and well-being of their inhabitants. The list of cities is made out on the basis of factors ranging from cultural life, incentives for entrepreneurs, international transport possibilities, communications, crime rates and architecture to public welfare systems. 

Top 10 best cities for quality of life

1. Copenhagen
2. Munich
3. Tokyo
4. Zürich
5. Helsinki
6. Vienna
7. Stockholm
8. Vancouver
9. Melbourne
10. Paris

Besides the main title as the best city for quality of life Monocle has special awards to towns doing well and being interesting within trade, culture, design, retail  and globalisation. Copenhagen was awarded a special award as ”best design city”.

Copenhagen is world known for its art and crafts, we at Red Apple Apartments often get questions about where to go and what to look for in that category. One of the places we always recommend is Royal Copenhagen because it is as Danish as Denmark itself. We decided to post information here so you would have some basic information about the company and its history and heritage.

When people think of art from Denmark they often think of Royal Copenhagen or the Royal Porcelain Factory. This special kind of porcelain is as much a part of Denmark’s history as the Vikings.

The Royal Porcelain Factory was founded in 1775. The whole purpose of the factory was to create dining services for the royal family. This continued for many years until it gained notoriety by participating in the Worlds Fair. By the late 1800s people around the world were falling in love with Royal Copenhagen, and the rest is history.

Royal Copenhagen

Today, Royal Copenhagen is privately run and has merged or been bought by a variety of different companies. Regardless of its ownership, fans of this lovely porcelain still know it’s real by the mark: three wavy lines one above the other. These three lines represent the Oresund Straight, the Great Belt Straight, and the Little Belt Straight in Denmark. Although many try to replicate the Royal Copenhagen, none of them can come close.

On the company’s Web site it says that each piece of porcelain is touched by thirty different sets of hands before it is sold. Since everything is done by hand, from the molding to the firing, each piece of Royal Copenhagen is a one of a kind.

Where to buy Royal Copenhagen

Royal Copenhagen can be purchased online, at official Royal Copenhagen retail stories in Denmark, Japan, Korea and Singapore, or through special dealers around the world. More information can be found on Royal Copenhagen’s Web site.

While in Copenhagen a visit to the Royal Copenhagen Museum should be on your list of things to do. Admission is free and you will see, up close, how a piece of porcelain is made. The museum is on the second floor of the Royal Copenhagen Flagship Store so once you’ve learned all the history you can handle, head downstairs where you can purchase some of this fine porcelain.

Purchasing Royal Copenhagen for the first time

There are hundreds of pieces, both new and antique, that you may fall in love with. However, if you want to start your collection gradually, many fans of Royal Copenhagen adore the series of annual pieces like the Annual Mug and the Christmas Plate, just to name a couple.

Other Royal Copenhagen collectors opt for the Blue Fluted style of dinnerware. This style was adopted from the original Chinese craftsmen who created it centuries ago. Since porcelain’s arrival in Europe in the 1700s, many porcelain makers have modified the craft to make it their own. Royal Copenhagen has hundreds of pieces in the spirit of Blue Fluted porcelain. The pieces have a gilded edge and Danish flora motifs.

We’ve mentioned the Royal Copenhagen Web site a couple of times in this post. We suggest you check it out for more information on the history of Royal Copenhagen and to see their current catalogue of porcelain.

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Copenhagen Fashion Week

Two times a year, it becomes very difficult to find accommodation in Copenhagen. It is because of the Copenhagen Fashion Week which seems to be extreemly popular.

Professional, passionate or fashion victim, you’ll definitely find your place in Copenhagen during the August 06^th to 10^th Fashion week. Wrapping up twice a year (February and August), the fashion hub of Scandinavia brings the attention of more than 50,000 designers, buyers and global press on the small and cozy capital.

Copenhagen Fashion Week is all about sales. A prime focus of the event is the homegrown houses and designers – a great opportunity to explore the innovative Danish fashion – a slave of functionality and femininity.

You can browse up more than 2300 international brand collections at the three simultaneous clothing trade fares:

1. The Copenhagen Vision means Danish fashion.
2. The Gallery is a trip among the Nordic fashion houses.
3. The Copenhagen International Fashion Fair has all the international labels.

During the weekend, the Copenhagen fashion event is an open party – brands exhibit in squares and showrooms all over the city, big screen around the city broadcast live all the shows and you can even get a makeover or win a ticket to one of the shows. And still, if that is not enough, read the festival’s official newspaper, Dansk Daily or check with the fashion channel for interviews and red carpet coverage.

A free shuttle bus can take you between the larger venues during the Fashion Week – a great opportunity for discovering Copenhagen at a glimpse!

For those interested we still have couple of available apartments but it is getting increasingly more difficult to find suitable accommodation. You can try to contact us through email at info@redapplepartments.com if you have special needs. We will always try to accommodate you.