Holiday home with raw aesthetics and elegant acoustics

When Ivar and Dorthea took over the family holiday home in summer 2015, they decided to demolish it and build a new one. While the untreated larch facade emphasises the raw and Nordic look of the house, an elegant wood strip ceiling solution ensures a fine balance between acoustics and aesthetics.

On a picturesque plot in the village of Hulsig south of Skagen in northern Denmark, Ivar and Dorthea have built a new holiday home for the whole family. When they took over the property right at the top of Denmark from Ivar’s parents in 2015, they decided to tear down the existing run-down cottage from 1967, and its place constructed a new wooden holiday home.

One of the top priorities for the new owners was that their new holiday home should be as low-maintenance as possible. Therefore, the building exteriors are clad with untreated larch, which also contributes to creating a restrained modernist style.

“The interior is faithful to the building’s exterior design. The walls are clad with birch plywood sheets, which have been treated with floor varnish. Together with the large window sections, it means that the rooms are dominated by hard surfaces, and we therefore recommended that the owners choose a sound-absorbing ceiling solution,” says Hanne Lind-Bonderup, an architect and partner at the architects Tegnestuen LBB3. 

Functional and aesthetic
In order to ensure good acoustics, the owners therefore selected a ceiling made of Troldtekt acoustic panels in all the rooms. Wooden strips were then fitted to the underside of the panels, creating a sense of visual harmony between the ceiling and the rest of the interior design.

“We were inspired by a ceiling that we’d seen at the Nordic Watercolour Museum in Skärhamn in Sweden, featuring pale strips of wood beneath acoustic panels. At a meeting with our architects, we saw that they had a similar wood strip ceiling at their offices, so we decided to replicate the solution in our holiday home. We’re extremely happy with it, because it combines visual elegance with outstanding acoustics,” says Ivar.