Bjarke Ingels Designed This Danish Home to Showcase Its Owner’s Vintage Car Collection

The pleasures of collecting and the perplexities of display go hand and hand. What good, after all, are your treasures if you can’t enjoy them daily? Majolica, first editions, and nesting dolls are one thing, but when your prized keepsakes are automobiles, no traditional wunderkammer will do. Such was the case for Mads Peter Veiby, a Danish entrepreneur with a cherished trove of vintage cars. After buying a hilltop parcel on the outskirts of Aalborg, in northern Denmark, he dreamed of a livable showcase where his “art on wheels” could coexist with family life. The question was how.…

Then Bjarke Ingels called out of the blue. “He said, ‘We are going to do a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off house—only even more beautiful,’” recalls Veiby, whose phone number and ambitions had been shared with Ingels via a mutual acquaintance. The architect was referring, of course, to the iconic glass-and-steel pavilion in John Hughes’s 1986 film, a structure that doubled as a trophy case for the fictional Frye family’s ill-fated Ferrari.

“The challenge was to make a building where the cars are part of the house,” reflects the AD100 star, founder of BIG–Bjarke Ingels Group. “He wanted his collection to be catered for as an integrated part of the home, rather than just hidden away in a garage.”

BIG’s solution responded as much to that mandate as to the site: a onetime agricultural plot that had been embraced by the local community as shared green space. “Alps is a strong word, but by Danish standards it’s as good as it gets,” says Ingels, noting that the sloping grounds had become a popular sledding spot in the area’s otherwise flat terrain. “Our goal was to leave the majority of the land public, so that snow tubing could continue in perpetuity.” Veiby, whose many business ventures include real estate development, envisioned lots for additional houses on the parcel, necessitating a clever master plan with clustered subdivisions. His own house, meanwhile, would sit at the land’s highest point, blessed with the best views but also exposed to the public.

To conceive a home that was both open to the terrain and private, Ingels and his team began with a simple idea: arranging the house into a single long building, with cars at one end and living spaces at the other. “Then we took that logic and wrapped it around the top of the hill, creating a ribbon, or loop, that overlaps itself as it climbs the terrain,” he notes. Cars enter the home at ground level, pulling into a gallery-like expanse that accommodates as many as eight vehicles. From there, rooms snake upward, arranged in a linear plan along a curved, gently sloping corridor that is illuminated by skylights but otherwise windowless. “The hallway has this infinite feeling,” says Ingels. “From many angles, you can’t see the end in either direction.”

When the views reveal themselves they do so magnificently, through floor-to-ceiling glass along the loop’s interior. All of the bedrooms and living areas are elevated above the garage end, affording sweeping vistas of the surrounding meadows, which remain open for public use. Stealing the spotlight, of course, are Veiby’s beloved sports cars, visible across the courtyard. Lined up on a recent visit were several rare Porsches, among them a 1959 356 Outlaw and a 1979 930 Turbo, also known as the Widowmaker. (He keeps additional models beneath the green-roofed carport and in an off-site garage.) Thanks to BIG’s clever form making, Veiby can take them in from the moment he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep, turning off the garage lights remotely from bed.

What he, his wife, Rikke Rytter Veiby, and their two children, Signe-Marie and Carl-Peter, don’t see are prying eyes. To maintain privacy, BIG clad the exterior of the house in a solid wall—save for a single vertical slit (he calls it a “cyclopic”) that overlooks the front doors and allows the family to observe visitors. Though they originally imagined concrete façades, the firm ultimately used less-expensive whitewashed brick, a tried-and-true material in the Danish vernacular and a natural choice for curves. In another fortuitous twist of budgetary fate, they scrapped plans for overhangs and a cantilevered terrace. Now the loop culminates in one elegant plate of glass—no mullions, just one uninterrupted view.

“When you see it, the house reads as effortless, as if it was designed in a single doodle,” says the architect. “In the end, it’s a very simple house that produces a lot of different experiences and surprises.” Those include epic sunrises and occasional blankets of fog, as clouds roll in across the terrain. The one spot where the looping form overlaps itself, meanwhile, gave way to a sculptural staircase, with a tear-shaped skylight above that coaxes precious Scandinavian sun into both levels. And the radical circular plan has yielded a kind of benevolent parental panopticon, allowing the couple to see whose rooms are lit and determine whether their independent teenagers are home for the night.

Reflecting on his unusual hybrid mandate, Ingels calls the home “a house that is as raw and simple as a garage and a garage that is as generous and open as a house.” For Veiby, it’s
a gamble he would gladly make again. “In 100 years, people may say that once upon a time a crazy guy lived up on that hill,” he jokes. “At some point in life you have to make a decision that doesn’t make sense.” Literally and figuratively, he muses, “I had been living in that square box.”

This story appears in AD***’s January 2023 issue. To see this Bjarke Ingels–designed home in print,*** subscribe to AD.