“I’m swimming almost every morning, even now when it’s starting to be very cold,” said Soren Hvalsoe Garde, speaking in October from Scandinavia.
Mr. Garde, 62, the founder of Garde Hvalsoe, a Danish company that produces cabinetry and furniture, was not talking about dipping a toe into a heated pool. He was talking about lowering himself over the side of his floating home into the waters of Copenhagen’s harbor.
For more than a year, he and his wife, Rita Vibild, have lived on a stationary boat in the center of town, between the opera house and the soon-to-be-completed Paper Island development, a cluster of pale brick pyramids containing apartments and businesses. But if the couple choose to turn their backs on urban culture, they can sit on one of their terraces and face a park with 4,600 different plants across the canal on which they are moored.
This amphibious lifestyle is the culmination of a decade of downsizing.
In 2014, the couple were empty nesters, living in a two-story apartment in a 1920s villa in Copenhagen that had been the home of the modernist Danish architect Vilhelm Lauritzen. That year, they sold the unit, with its Garde Hvalsoe kitchen and bathroom, to a deeply appreciative interior designer and moved to a penthouse apartment that was smaller.
But not nautical. Inspired by the Urban Rigger housing development built from shipping containers floating off an island in Copenhagen, Mr. Garde set out to design an offshore home. “I was kind of committed to the idea of a submarine,” he said. He received approval from the local authorities for an “upside-down house” topped by a keel-shaped zinc roof.
He scrapped that concept in 2017, when Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist, was murdered by a Danish entrepreneur she had been profiling for Wired magazine. The scene of her demise and dismemberment was the entrepreneur’s hand-built miniature submarine near Copenhagen.
“I said to my wife, ‘Hey, we can’t do this,’” Mr. Garde recalled.
After trying again, and judging his second effort to be an aesthetic failure, he hired Anders Halsteen, an architect with experience designing floating homes, to work on the third and final iteration: two stacked rectangles wrapped in dark wood and zinc, with terraces on both levels. The zinc was Mr. Garde’s tribute to black iron hulls; the wood recalled the rounded cabins protruding from the decks of old ships.
These nautical gestures were subtle for a reason: “If you try to make a house on the water look like a boat, the risk is that it’s going to look like something that should have been in a theme park,” Mr. Halsteen said.
If anything, the 1,507-square-foot building looks like a Scandinavian modernist’s dream. The upper level is a single open room centered on a kitchen with oak floors, iron-gray linoleum cabinets, dark stone countertops and sliding glass doors facing west to capture afternoon sunlight and evening sunsets.
The dining and living areas are furnished with vintage pieces from midcentury Danish and Swedish notables (Hans Wegner, Bruno Mathsson, Hannes Wettstein) as well as a table Mr. Garde designed and built.
Apart from the transparency, the only visible nods to the liquid environment are a couple of porthole windows and the iron rods that connect the lighting fixtures to the kitchen ceiling, replacing cords that would have swung when the weather turned heavy.
The lower level, which is sunk about a foot below the surface of the canal (the house sits in a kind of tub, with a retaining wall around its base), offers more of a duck’s-eye view of the waterway. This area is divided into two bedrooms, a bathroom (in addition to the half-bath upstairs), an office and a wine room that is cooled by the canal water running underneath.
The partly submerged terrace beyond the main bedroom is equipped with a ladder that Mr. Garde climbs to enter the canal for his daily dips. Between the currents, the seaweed and the purging of industry from downtown Copenhagen, he said, the water is clean.
So let’s talk about storms.
“We have only one or two a season, coming always in fall or winter,” Mr. Garde said. The first that he experienced brought the city to a standstill last year just before Christmas. But the house is in a protected area of the harbor. Hardly worth mentioning, he said, except that there was no denying in those bumpy hours that life on water is very different from life on land.
The house may rock, but it isn’t going anywhere. It was built by a Danish company in Poland and floated to Copenhagen, and there its journey ended. (The total price, including interior finishes, was about $918 per square foot.) Mr. Garde said he intended to buy a motorboat in spring for sprints around Copenhagen’s canal system.
“Then you can go around for hours in all kinds of special environments in the city, and that’s something that brings joy and happiness,” he said.
Mr. Halsteen remains a little on edge, not because of any lack of faith in the water-worthiness of his creation but because it is situated just opposite the Royal Danish Academy, with its venerable architecture program.
“There’s a lot of people passing that boat every day who have strong opinions about design,” he said. “There’s some pressure there.”
Living Small is a biweekly column exploring what it takes to lead a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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