Living The Danish Dream

Living the Danish dream Beaches, bikes, smoked fish and wood-burning stoves: Nick Curtis and his wife spend a week in Scandi-heaven.

‘Why don’t you use the summerhouse?’ asked my sister Rachel. We’d been talking about flying out to visit them in Copenhagen, where she lives with her Danish husband Mads and their three children. Their summerhouse is a simple, single-storey, four-bedroom wooden structure, one among hundreds, perhaps even thousands, each on a plot of about half an acre, ranged along the north-west coast of the main Danish island of Sjaelland. (There are summerhouses in other parts, too, of course.) It’s a short bike ride from a breezy but sun-strafed grey-sand beach shelving slowly into the Kattegat strait between the North Sea and the Baltic, and it’s pretty damn idyllic.

My sister’s family, like many Danes, use their summerhouse as a weekend escape from hectic lives. Rachel works for a biotech company and Mads is a financial journalist. For him, the summerhouse is a place to get his hands dirty with DIY, and regain a taste of the country life he had growing up in rural Jutland. He and I and some close male friends have spent several weekends there chopping down trees, building fires, indulging in target practice with the air rifle and bow and arrow he keeps and playing cards (some drink is usually taken, too). My wife, Ann, had only been once, and briefly. We jumped at the chance.