Quiet
buildings.
A practice of restraint.
Lyø HouseA house for two winters.
The brief was a small house for a retired marine biologist and her partner — a place to keep their books, watch the weather, and host their two daughters once a year. The site is a windbreak of pine on the western edge of Lyø. The house turns its back to the prevailing wind and opens to a courtyard of black basalt and ferns.
We worked with a small palette: lime, fir, basalt. Everything is left to age — the timber will silver in three winters, the concrete will hold the marks of its formwork forever.
- One kitchen, one fireplace.
- Two bedrooms, one bath.
- A library that doubles as a guest room.
- A courtyard you can walk around in slippers.
We design buildings that do not ask for attention.
TEMPER was founded in 2014 by Sofie Nørgaard and Anders Holm. Twenty-five of us work from a former joinery on Rosenørns Allé in Frederiksberg. We make houses, civic buildings, restaurants and the occasional small museum.
Our work is slow. We draw by hand, prototype in the workshop on the ground floor, and visit the site through every season before we agree on a plan. We believe a building should still feel honest when nobody is looking at it.
Quiet,
but noticed.
- 2024Architizer A+ · Top 100International
- 2023Wallpaper* Design AwardBest New House
- 2023ArchDaily Building of the YearHouses
- 2022Mies van der Rohe — Emerging ArchitectEuropean Union
- 2021Iconic Award · Innovative ArchitectureGermany
- 2020World Architecture FestivalShortlist · Small Projects
What people have written about quiet work.
“TEMPER builds the way a good novelist writes — slowly, with confidence, and with the patience to let the material do most of the talking.”
“There is a quietness to their work that feels almost defiant in the current climate of architectural noise.”
“Few young European studios have demonstrated such a consistent material intelligence.”
“Nørgaard and Holm have built a practice that refuses spectacle and is all the better for it.”
“Klint Museum is a master class in how to put a roof on a landscape without ever quite covering it.”
A building should outlive the photograph of it.