Ulrike Acker-Thomsen

CIRC&LOV is a Hamburg-based startup redefining how commercial interiors are designed, furnished and maintained — with circularity at its core. Every week, thousands of perfectly usable pieces of office furniture — desks, chairs, shelving, built-ins — end up in skips. Not because they're broken, but because linear thinking in the interior industry defaults to replacement over reuse. CIRC&LOV challenges that logic. Working with offices, retail spaces, schools, universities and public interiors, CIRC&LOV offers a full-service circular interior design process: from initial furniture assessment and upcycling concepts through to final implementation. The team of interior architects, designers and sustainability experts identifies what can stay, what can be refreshed, what can be fully upcycled — and what genuinely needs to go. The result is a high-quality, design-led space, built largely from existing resources. Beyond aesthetics, every project generates clean, traceable CO₂ data ready for sustainability reporting — making circular choices measurable and communicable. CIRC&LOV is currently developing AI-powered software to scale and streamline this process, supported by HITeC e.V. / Universität Hamburg within the EDIH Hamburg programme. The startup is actively seeking pilot projects across Hamburg/Berlin, northern Germany and the wider DACH region, as well as the Netherlands, Denmark etc..