Assigment: Previously used as a private student collective, the project aims to transform the apartment into a family home for a single father and his daughter. It seeks to fulfill the client’s wish for contemporary spaces that balance monumental moments with minimalistic solutions, within a building that bears little trace of its original construction from 1892.

Architectural Intent: By redefining the spatial organization of the apartment, the aim is to create a more open and cohesive layout centered around the home’s social areas and in connection to the backyard.


Architectural Ambition: The ambition is to create a refined and enduring home that reflects the client’s vision while enhancing the apartment’s inherent spatial boundaries and qualities.

Located right next to historic institutions such as Christiansborg, Glyptoteket, Tivoli, and the National Museum of Denmark, the apartment stands as part of the city’s dense late-19th-century urban fabric. The building was completed during a period of rapid industrial growth, when Copenhagen’s inner districts were shaped by the ideals of compactness, efficiency, and social order. Dating back to 1892, it belongs to the typology of the traditional Copenhagen apartment building — a brick structure organized around a central courtyard, reflecting the urban housing model that shaped the city’s expansion at the turn of the century.


The architecture is characteristic of its era: solid masonry façades, rhythmic window arrangements, and restrained ornamentation that balances modesty with craftsmanship. Facing the street, the building presents a formal, symmetrical elevation in red brick, while the courtyard façade is simpler and more utilitarian, opening toward light and air. This duality — between the representative street front and the intimate interior courtyard — has long defined the social and spatial logic of the city.


The building embodies the enduring qualities of Copenhagen’s historic housing — among them, rooms of generous height, deep window niches, and layers of high-quality materials. These inherent characteristics lay a strong foundation for the commissioned transformation, offering the potential to amplify the apartment’s spatial character while finding solutions that meet the client’s needs.

The client commissioned a larger kitchen connected to the living room, forming an open-plan space. To accommodate this, the two largest rooms facing the backyard were merged into one continuous space, with the new kitchen positioned adjacent to an existing pantry, now used for dry storage and recycling. Previously, the kitchen had been located next to a small bathroom. These two rooms underwent the most extensive transformation, establishing a coherent and flow to the spatial layout. By aligning the corners of the new walls with the existing angled geometry, the floor plan now achieves a more natural circulation, connecting the living room, bathroom, back door, and daughter’s bedroom. The hallway that links these spaces now also functions as a laundry room. This reorganization allowed for the creation of a distinct and private wing for the daughter within the home.  The floors in the laundry room and the daughter’s bedroom were replaced with new oak mosaic parquet, matching the apartment’s original 1892 flooring.


On the opposite side of the open-plan space, the client commissioned an office and music room, as well as a larger bedroom. These rooms as well as every other room in the apartment was renovated, as the previous owners had not maintained the standard or character of the original interior. 

 
The new layout of the bathroom accommodates a comfortably sized shower niche, along with additional space for storage, sink, and a toilet. The client requested a monumental yet minimalist design, demanding a high level of precision. Although the nine distinct bathroom walls initially could disrupted the sense of balance and order, the careful composition of materials, fixtures, and spatial elements brought cohesion to the room, creating a tranquil and harmonious atmosphere.