Cozy 1894 townhouse in Denmark

This small townhouse is located on an alley near the center of the Danish port town of Holbæk. It was built in 1894 and has been modernized since then. With only 49 m² (527 ft²) over two levels to work with, the owners have used a number of tricks to get maximum utility from the small floor plan.

The front door opens into a narrow stair hall. The hall proceeds straight ahead to the kitchen, but it is such a tight squeeze past the stairs that it hardly qualifies as a hallway. Possibly the stairs were updated to meet current building standards at some point, with the original stairs being narrower than the current ones. With that being the case, the hallway seems to be used mostly as a storage space with the main circulation path to the kitchen cutting to the left through the living and dining rooms.

The living room and adjacent dining room are both a comfortable size. Windows at either end keep the space bright. Although the home now has in-floor radiant heating on the lower level, there is also a small woodstove. With limited wall space, the owners mounted their TV next to the woodstove. Heat will reduce the lifetime of electronics, so they also installed a vertical copper heat shield between the stove and the TV. The compact kitchen maximizes storage with drawers in the toe-kick space and a rod mounted across the window for hanging utensils. The back door off the kitchen leads to a stone-paved patio in the backyard. A shed along one side houses the laundry.

The upstairs consists of a main room with exposed beams and a three-piece bathroom with shower. The owners used a free-standing closet and storage cabinet to divide the space into a bedroom and a home office area. To get a bit more usable space, they replaced part of the guardrail with a dresser that overhangs the stairway opening.

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Photographs courtesy of DanBolig.dk.

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