“I’m swimming almost every morning, even now when it’s starting to be very cold,” said Soren Hvalsoe Garde, speaking in October from Scandinavia.
Mr. Garde, 62, the founder of Garde Hvalsoe, a Danish company that produces cabinetry and furniture, was not talking about dipping a toe into a heated pool. He was talking about lowering himself over the side of his floating home into the waters of Copenhagen’s harbor.
Soren Hvalsoe Garde and Rita Vibild on one of their terraces. The spire behind them is part of the Church of Our Savior, one of Copenhagen’s most famous sights.Credit…Birgitta Wolfgang
For more than a year, he and his wife, Rita Vibild, have lived on a stationary boat in the center of town, between the opera house and the soon-to-be-completed Paper Island development, a cluster of pale brick pyramids containing apartments and businesses. But if the couple choose to turn their backs on urban culture, they can sit on one of their terraces and face a park with 4,600 different plants across the canal on which they are moored.
This amphibious lifestyle is the culmination of a decade of downsizing.
In 2014, the couple were empty nesters, living in a two-story apartment in a 1920s villa in Copenhagen that had been the home of the modernist Danish architect Vilhelm Lauritzen. That year, they sold the unit, with its Garde Hvalsoe kitchen and bathroom, to a deeply appreciative interior designer and moved to a penthouse apartment that was smaller.
