Tiny beach cottage in Denmark

This tiny cottage is just a few steps from the beach in Kerteminde, Denmark. Kerteminde is a small harbor town about a two-hour drive from Copenhagen. Built in 1945 as a vacation getaway, the cottage squeezes one bedroom into a floor plan of just 26 m² (280 ft²). As you might imagine, things get a little bit tight inside.

The living room looks cozy but functional and has a nice wood ceiling. The bedroom is barely wide enough to fit the bed, but it seems to work too. However the bathroom is very cramped and the kitchen lacks both counter space and a fridge. The kitchen also has to double as the cottage’s main entry.

There is some unused space in front of the kitchen window though. One possibility is to extend the counter under the window and steal a bit of space from the bedroom to create an alcove for the fridge on the opposite wall, although the bedroom is already very small as it is.

A better solution might be to expand the kitchen outwards, if you could get approval to do so. Pushing the wall out to align with the attached shed would give enough space for a compact but functional kitchen. Likewise, it might be possible to expand the bathroom into the attached shed.

If expanding the floor plan wasn’t allowed and we had to stick within the existing footprint, then I think we would swap the kitchen and bedroom (“værelse”). Most of the kitchen could be turned into a bed alcove, perhaps with pocket doors to close it off from the living room.

The bathroom could expand into the stove end of the old kitchen, and have a new entrance coming from the new kitchen in the old bedroom. That bedroom is wide enough that you could have counters or storage along both the exterior wall and the wall shared with the living room. Another option is to create a larger opening from the living room to the new kitchen. The door from the covered terrace at that side of the cottage would become the new main entrance, which makes sense as it is closest to the street.

If this tiny beach cottage was yours, what, if anything, would you change?

If you come up with some really great ideas, the cottage is for sale through EDC. The asking price is 395,000 Danish kroner, or roughly US$57,000. Note, however, that it sits on leased land.

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Photographs by courtesy of EDC.

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