Fjordly House
- Sønderborg, Denmark
- Rune Bakke
- Residential
- 2024
The clients had spent thirty summers in a caravan on this plot and were clear about what they did not want: a single warm box with a view. What they described instead was a compound — separate places to sleep, cook, wash and work, with weather in between them.
So the house is four pavilions of roughly equal size, set on the corners of a square and turned a few degrees off one another to close the courtyard against the prevailing westerly. Each pavilion has one function, one door and one window facing the water. The courtyard between them is paved in the same brick as the interiors, so the threshold at each door is a change of temperature rather than a change of surface.
Construction is deliberately ordinary. Timber frame, larch cladding left to silver, roofs in untreated zinc, no insulation beyond what a season from April to October requires. The whole compound can be closed for winter in an afternoon by shuttering eight openings. There is no underfloor heating and no mechanical ventilation; the sleeping pavilion has a wood stove and the kitchen has a range, and that is the extent of the plant.
Inside, each pavilion is a single lined room. The sleeping pavilion is the smallest and darkest, with a bed built into the gable and a window low enough to see the water from the pillow. The kitchen pavilion is the largest and takes a long table down its length. The washing pavilion is half open to the sky. The fourth is empty and has been used, over two seasons, as a studio, a workshop and a place to hang wet sails.
It is not an efficient way to build a house. It is a very good way to spend a summer.