Visitors driving into Rågeleje, a resort town north of Copenhagen, are greeted by pastel-striped beach huts against a backdrop of the Kattegat sea. A country road that turns away from the coast leads to an inconspicuous, low-slung house that’s shrouded in greenery. This serene space, with a veranda and garden filled with wildflowers, has been the holiday home of Thomas Lykke and his family for more than 12 years but he’d had his eyes on it since he was 10 years old. “When I was a little boy I used to play here with the family that built this house,” says the Danish designer. “About 10 years ago, I came back and put a letter in the mailbox saying that if the house was for sale, I’d like to buy it. Two weeks later it was mine.”
Lykke spent his childhood summers next door, in a house that his great-great-grandparents built in 1933. “When they came here there was only farmland,” he says. In the mid-1950s the fishing village was transformed by an eccentric art gallerist from Copenhagen, who turned its inn into a jazz bar and invited musicians and artists. By the time Lykke was growing up, the village was a popular resort town and the hill was full of holiday homes. “I was already fascinated by this house back then because it was very different, almost Japanese,” he says over coffee by the kitchen counter.
With an exterior painted in black and burnt red, and angled roofs covered in green grass and succulents, the house is a far cry from traditional Danish cottages. Built in 1973 and designed by architect Erik Berg, it’s an early example of a prefabricated Danish summer home. Berg’s houses came in different sizes with extra options, such as a guesthouse and a sauna. Novel for the time, they were marketed as a concept that could be tailored to different families’ needs.
By the time Lykke moved in, the house had passed through three owners. The interior walls had been painted white and a French architect couple had built a master bedroom extension. Lykke has also upgraded and expanded the home, putting his woodworking skills to use – his grandfather was a carpenter – to lay wooden floors and build a Japanese-style bathroom annex, as well as a separate garage to house his 1986 Jaguar. However, a visitor would struggle to distinguish between old and new. “I want to stay true to the original architecture, which follows simple principles,” he says, pointing to the wooden planks and angled roof running across the original cottage and extensions. “There’s a rhythm to it that you can easily follow.”
Some of the furniture harks back to the 1970s, including the living room’s round tray tables, designed by Hans Bølling, and a pair of vintage wicker chairs. But Lykke’s aim is not to furnish the house exactly as it would have been in the era. “It’s important that it is very casual and not too perfect,” he says. In the open-plan living room, Lykke built a dinner table, stereo rack and counter, separating the lounge area from the kitchen.
Just as Berg intended, the holiday house has proven adaptable to the family’s needs, which vary from entertaining large groups of friends to calm seclusion. “If you open the doors to the veranda, it feels as though the living room doubles in size and the whole space is activated,” says Lykke. “But the house is also very private. I like it when it’s quiet, when I have no plans and can recharge my batteries. This is my retreat.”
Take a trip to Copenhagen, Stockholm or Oslo right now and you will find these Nordic capitals bereft of locals. The great migration of the Scandinavians to their summerhouses is well underway.
But the type of summerhouse that each of the old Viking tribes favours says a lot about them. A Norwegian views theirs primarily as a base for friluftsliv (open-air living), which involves unnecessarily arduous tasks such as hiking, canoeing or chopping wood in preparation for a winter of crosscountry skiing, downhill skiing and – I wouldn’t put it past them – probably uphill skiing too. The Swedes’ ideal summerhouse is a hut deep in the woods, far from other humans, with no running water, electricity or heating – plus a cloud of flying, biting things that lurks just outside the door. An idyllic blend to appease Sweden’s primary national urges for solitude and masochism.
Fortunately for this Denmark resident, the Danes take a more laissez-faire approach. A Danish summerhouse is a place to chill, talk, sleep, read, drink and pursue other leisurely pleasures, ideally within sight of a beach. For that reason, it will be designed with the lowest possible maintenance in mind: the grass can grow long (it being good for biodiversity is the excuse); the mismatched furniture is part of the vibe; and never mind the sand in the kitchen – it’s a summerhouse, after all.
But best of all, when you buy a Danish summerhouse – as I have just done, completing the final piece of my assimilation – it comes with all the furniture, crockery and bedding from the previous owners. What’s in that cupboard? Ah, two decades’ worth of completed wordsearch books and Donald Duck comics. Is that Chinese vase in the toolshed worth anything? The Søstrene Grene sticker suggests otherwise. Will the oven work (no) and what to do with the tiki-style lounge furniture? The answer: give it away on the front lawn. But don’t forget to put the amateurish art back up when the former owner pops round for a friendly coffee.
Yet while a Danish summerhouse might appear a relaxed place, somewhere to escape the relentless narcissism-of-small-differences status race of Copenhagen’s bridge quarters – the truth is that there is still much to decode in the summerhouse landscape.
Location, of course, is a status symbol. It explains why a house two miles (3.2km) from the sea in Tisvildeleje – the once old money, now just money resort on the north coast of Zealand – will cost as much as one right on the beach elsewhere on the island. Meanwhile, Skagen, at the northern tip of Jutland, is the summerhouse resort of choice for the nouveau riche but only for one specific week in mid-July: week 29 (Danes order their year by the number of the week). Locals refer to this as “Hellerup Week”, after the northern suburb of Copenhagen where said nouveaus and social-media influencers otherwise reside.
The west coast of Jutland holds a special place in Danish hearts and so there are tens of thousands of summerhouses nestled here in the hilly sands that stretch from the German border right up to “Cold Hawaii”, as the northern Jutland surf resort of Klitmøller is known (klit means “dune” in Danish; get over it). But I have never understood the appeal of this coast: for about 363 days of the year, the sea is too rough for swimming and relentless winds whip sand in your face. Is there an exfoliating effect that I’m missing?
Recently, the smart summerhouse money has been heading for the previously unloved island of Lolland to the south of Copenhagen. It’s a bet on the influx of German tourists who will be connected to Lolland via the Fehmarnbelt tunnel, due to open in 2029. But I have a soft spot for the South Funen Archipelago, with its dolphins, fishing harbours and a culture and history all of its own.
As a foreigner, I am free to choose my summerhouse location without all the socio-economic baggage, so I am writing this at my dining table (pine, naturally) looking out on a sandy beach, watching the sun set behind the island in the bay as the local ferry chugs steadily across the horizon. It still cost several times my first flat in Pimlico – for a little wooden shack with a supposedly flat but worryingly bowed roof – but it is, for July at least, home.
