“How do you create something dynamic while honoring the past?” That was the question posed by Mikkel Beedholm of KHR Architecture when approached by a Copenhagen couple looking to build a summer cottage on the Danish Riviera of North Zealand. The site offered a pastoral canvas, with slender pines to punctuate the morning light and a gentle hill that cradles the setting sun. But the property also came with restrictions in accordance with the community, a planned group of midcentury dwellings, all modest in profile and topped by thatched roofs. Anything new had to blend in.
The clients—Lars Thrane, an engineer-entrepreneur, and his wife, Lene Kamm, a documentarian-psychologist—offered a straightforward if open-ended mandate: someplace, in her words, “calm, but warm and welcoming,” with privacy from nearby neighbors. An initial brainstorming session on-site quickly morphed into an hours-long conversation unrelated to the project. “That gave me a feeling,” recalls Beedholm. “By talking about everything else you understand who someone is.”
Spanning some 3,200 square feet, the residence reflects both local building techniques and the owners’ casual lifestyle, its floor plan functioning just as well for the two of them as for a packed house. You enter from the northwest corner, moving down a hallway with broad windows that blur indoors and out. A single-height kitchen gives way to the double-height dining and living areas in a sequence of compression and expansion. Back in the kitchen, a pocket door reveals stairs to the loftlike primary suite. Three guest bedrooms, meanwhile, get their own wing, accessible down the discreet hall just past the entrance.
“It was about turning a classical layout into a fluid plan,” says Beedholm. “This is a house with no dead ends.” Hence ground-level bedrooms open directly to the surrounding landscape, and the primary bath features both an internal window to the living area below and, in the shower, an ethereal skylight. Crafted out of Phragmites australis reeds, the thatched roof similarly stays true to the local vernacular, albeit with a sculptural twist—its steep pitch and dramatic overhangs buck convention.
