Svend Buchardt is a light lover. Light, he says, makes him breathe, eat, digest, sleep, and live better.

So he built a three-sided greenhouse house in a tranquil Nordic village, where he lives with his two teenage sons, to get a Mediterranean climate all year round.

His reasoning is simple. Denmark is windy and cold, but if you can protect yourself from that, you can live “outside,” under glass, on any sunny day of the year. The greenhouse does that job, and it doubles as a heat battery.

Once the sun has warmed it, Svend opens the big slider doors, lets the heat into the house, and closes it back up. “I can live off that for 3 or 4 days,” he says.

Summer is the other half of the balance. Because the glass wraps only three sides and not the roof, the house ventilates naturally, with strategic windows to open and close, so there’s no need for air conditioning. It’s all mechanical in the old-fashioned sense: he opens and closes doors and windows by hand.

Svend is a chef who designs commercial kitchens for a living, so the kitchen was never an afterthought. It opens straight into an indoor/outdoor dining room under the glass, where the family eats in the light even when it’s blowing outside.

The house is also zoned for hot and cold days, with east and west balconies that follow the sun: east for his early-rising son, west for his late sleeper.

The result is a home that stays balanced year-round, a yin-yang battery of heat and cold.

To contact Svend: [email protected]