Kalkhus Apartment
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- Ida Krøyer
- Residential
- 2025
The apartment came to us subdivided within an inch of its life — nine rooms, four of them without daylight, a corridor that turned three times between the front door and the canal. The original plan had been generous; a century of letting had made it mean. Our work was mostly subtraction.
Five rooms remain. Two internal walls came out entirely and one was replaced by a full-height double door in solid ash, so the enfilade from the entrance to the canal window is now unbroken. The corridor is gone. The service rooms are gathered against the party wall where there was never daylight to lose, and everything with a window is now a room somebody would want to sit in.
The finish is a single decision applied consistently: lime plaster, applied thin over the original substrate and left unsealed on every wall and ceiling. It absorbs and returns light rather than reflecting it, which is exactly the right behaviour for a north-facing room over water — on grey days the walls carry a faint warmth the sky does not. Where the plaster meets the floor there is no skirting, only a shadow gap.
Joinery is limited to three pieces: a kitchen run in waxed steel and ash, a wall of shelving in the study, and a bench in the window bay deep enough to sleep on. All three sit slightly away from the walls. The apartment's original mouldings and window architraves were kept and repaired rather than matched — the new work does not pretend to be old and does not fight what is.
The clients cook, read and have people over; there is no television in the plan. What the apartment now has instead is a long grey wall, four windows, and a great deal of nothing between them.