Alder House
- Møn, Denmark
- Ida Krøyer
- Residential
- 2026
The site had been a working orchard, and the first decision was to keep what was already growing. The house is set into the one clearing the alders had not reclaimed, its footprint drawn around three surviving trees rather than through them. What looks from the approach like a single long volume is in fact three, hinged slightly off one another so the plan follows the fall of the land.
Materially the house is short-listed almost to the point of austerity. Untreated Douglas fir on the outside, lime-washed plaster within, a floor of tumbled brick laid in a running bond that continues uninterrupted from the entrance through to the terrace. Nothing is painted. Nothing is sealed to a sheen. The palette is not a decision about colour so much as a decision about time — every surface here is chosen for how it will look in fifteen years, not on the day the scaffolding comes down.
Daylight is the plan's real organising device. The living volume faces north-west and takes the long evening light through a run of full-height glazing set behind a deep timber colonnade; the sleeping volume turns away from it, taking a narrower, cooler eastern light through a single window per room. Between them the kitchen sits under a raised roof lantern, so that at midday the brightest room in the house is the one at its centre.
Storage, services and the stair are gathered into a single joinery spine that runs the length of the middle volume. Treating them as one element rather than as a series of interventions keeps the inhabited rooms free of the small pieces of furniture a house of this size would otherwise accumulate. The spine is made of the same fir as the façade, left proud of the plaster so that its shadow line reads as a joint rather than a trim.
The result is quieter than its programme suggests. A family of five lives here through winter storms and August heat, and the architecture makes almost no argument about either. It holds a temperature, frames a view, and otherwise recedes — which is, we think, the most a house on a site like this one ought to do.