Architect Mikkel Bøgh has built his own vision of the holiday home of

the future

Following small, winding roads through a wilderness of old trees, traditional summer houses built in the 60s and 70s lay scattered throughout the forestry landscape. At the end of one road, a different kind of structure is nestled between the trees; two modern cabins connected by a terrace with barnlike roofs and larch and cedar cladding.

Here, architect and founder of design studio Forma, Mikkel Bøgh, spends most of his weekends along with artist and designer Sara Martinsen and their two children. Living in a small apartment in Copenhagen, the cabin offers a weekly escape outside of the city, closer to nature. When they don’t use it themselves, they share the house with friends or guests through Landfolk.

Made to be shared with others

“When our family expanded from three to four, we decided that extending our home with a weekend refuge was the way forward. Then it’s all about making sure that both our apartment and our summer house are shared with others and used when we’re not using the spaces ourselves,” Mikkel Bøgh says.

In bringing the summer house to life, the couple combined their strengths in architecture and design. “The design concept draws heavily on the vernacular of the Danish countryside. The steel frames entirely support the roof, which gives us complete freedom to create openings in the facade or move internal walls,” he explains.

In reality, we can take the whole house down and put it up somewhere else with very little waste

The Barnhouse Cabin, as they named the house, took its beginning in 2014 when Mikkel Bøgh and Sara Martinsen started building it with their own two hands. Sitting in the first building in the large, open room with an incredible view of the protected landscape that seems to go on and on, it’s hard to imagine it any different. But today, Mikkel Bøgh explains, he would never have built it as it is.

Embracing the honesty of materials

“We would never have done white plaster walls today. In all honesty, we were worried about having too much wood inside the house. Today, I know there is no such thing as too much wood,” he says. “There’s a kind of honesty about how the second house is built because you can see, feel and smell the plywood that hasn’t been covered up”.

For Mikkel Bøgh, there is no point in hiding natural materials behind a polished surface. Instead, we should embrace all the different aspects of the spaces we are surrounded by. “Why should we be hiding something anyway? Why should we not focus a lot more on getting the details right in order to make them truly stand out?”

I think there’s going to be a huge shift in our aesthetics in the near future in terms of material choices and detailing.

Designing for the future

When designing architecture fit to last for generations, there are of course multiple approaches. In building the Barnhouse Cabin, Mikkel Bøgh says, they used the principles of design for disassembly, screwing and bolting everything together so that the house can be taken apart if need be, making the house and land flexible for the needs of other people in the future.

”In reality, we can take the whole house down and put it up somewhere else with very little waste. Of course, this means you must appreciate the details at the top where you can see the bolts and so on. That’s the kind of aesthetic that comes with such a choice,” he says.

“I think there’s going to be a huge shift in our aesthetics in the near future in terms of material choices and detailing, and we might also see a division between those who continue business-as-usual, and those who are perhaps more concerned about the impact on our planet we make as humanity and as designers and architects. We have an obligation to start fixing our mistakes of the past and to stop making the same mistakes repeatedly.”

On using space mindfully

When building your summer house yourself, there are numerous considerations to take into account. Most importantly, it’s about building with the future in mind. What solutions can we choose today that will benefit us when our needs change? Here are Mikkel Bøgh’s best tips for designing a summer house.

Explore Mikkel's holiday home. Book it here.