A Danish apartment filled with beautiful antique and vintage decorations

Maria Toft has no time for formal tradition. ‘My Christmas reflects how we live the rest of the year,’ she says, explaining the lack of tree in the Frederiksberg apartment that she shares with her boyfriend, Anders, and her two children, Noah and Lula. ‘I’m not into classic Christmas decorations.’

But that’s not to say she’s against creating a little seasonal magic, and her spacious apartment twinkles and sparkles with all manner of unusual decorative details. In place of a tree, for instance, Maria likes to arrange sculptural twigs in a vast ceramic urn. This year, she has decorated them with delicate baubles and handmade angels.

During the festive season, Maria explains that she prefers to take stock of what she already has. ‘I think the best way to create a really personal Christmas is to look at your individual taste and enhance it with a few fresh touches in the same kind of style.’

From the moment you set foot in Maria’s home, it’s clear that she practises what she preaches. Wherever one looks there are intriguing curios and little festive touches to draw the eye: a bowl of antique glass baubles sits among the plates that fill the glazed cabinet in the dining room; a trail of sparkly ornaments snakes along a window sill; and simple garlands hang from the chandelier.

Maria selects decorations that give her home a seasonal lift without jarring with the overall day-to-day scheme, which is a pretty and quirky mix of vintage and antique furniture that she teams with Moroccan rugs and floral wallpapers.

You might also like a Dutch Christmas house in De Westereen

The pièce de résistance is the dining room wall, which is filled with vintage mirrors from floor to ceiling. The collection looks spectacular and took several years to complete. Luckily, this was no real hardship for Maria, who loves nothing more than trawling flea markets and antiques fairs.

Her style is unapologetically bohemian, and it is demonstrated in the items in her shop, Boho Habits. Here, customers can browse an intriguing mix of all the things she has filled her apartment with: unusual antique and vintage furniture, and decorative and quirky homewares – bevelled-edge mirrors, pretty transferware plates, glass domes filled with stuffed birds, and antique church candlesticks from France.

‘I never remove anything, I never throw anything away,’ she says. The idea of one in, one out is not for her. ‘If I buy something, old or new, it’s always an add-on. You can safely say that I am a maximalist,’ she laughs. ‘For me, it really is the more the merrier.’

This means that when Christmas rolls around, Maria doesn’t remove anything to make room for the festive fripperies. Instead, she prefers to sprinkle them here and there throughout the house, adding a few more as and when she likes over the holiday season. She believes that quietly discovering little additions as Christmas approaches increases the building excitement.

You might also like Celia Rufey's Christmas cottage

As well as small groups of decorations, she will also find one or two larger pieces that can take centre stage, such as the tin star propped on a window sill or the sculptural, almost black, pine cones that are dotted on tables and ledges around the apartment.

Maria likes to gently refresh her Christmas style every year. ‘Just enough to make it enchanting again,’ she says. The look begins with the making of the family’s advent wreath. This year’s palette of faded pinks came from a beautiful selection of dried flowers that included blowsy hydrangea heads and bunches of heather.

These delicate shades mirror the colours she’s used throughout the house, from the pink dining chairs to the soft, slightly faded tones of the various wallpapers.

‘For a maximalist like me, limiting the colours I choose for my Christmas decorations ensures a sense of calm above all.’ Maria buys with her heart rather than her head, refusing to be bound by rules relating to style and tradition.

This year’s decorations include old keys from a flea market in France, small Moroccan mirrors and vintage glass balls. ‘They are all things I’ve fallen in love with,’ she says, adding that they’re also things that would naturally fit in her home, regardless of the season.