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Lumen Architecture
Copenhagen — practising since 2009

Every building starts with the light

Lumen is a six-person studio designing sustainable houses and cultural buildings around the sun that actually falls on the site — measured across a full year before a single wall is drawn.

Start a projectSee the work
The Havnegade Pavilion at dusk: a curved glass building on the harbour, its fir-lined interior glowing warm above wide shallow steps, with the city on the far quay.

Recently completed

Havnegade Pavilion, Copenhagen — a public reading room on the water. Its plinth is laid in brick reclaimed from the warehouse that stood here, under forty metres of glass turned to catch the last of the west light.

2009
Studio founded

Six people in a Vesterbro print works

41
Buildings completed

Houses and cultural rooms

9 mo
First site visit to permit set

The first of those months spent watching the light

DGNB Gold
Our floor, not our ceiling

Certified on every new build since 2019

The practice

How a Lumen building gets made

Three habits we keep on every project, whether it is a garden studio or a reading room on the harbour.

The Lumen studio in Vesterbro: afternoon sun through sheer curtains falling across a timber worktable of massing models, with framed section drawings on the wall behind.

We measure the light before we draw

Every site gets a full year of sun studies — solstice to solstice, cloud cover included. Copenhagen hands you about 170 overcast days and a December sun that never climbs above eleven degrees, so the question is never how to shade a room. It is how to catch what little light there is and carry it deep into the plan.

  • Solstice-to-solstice sun studies on every site
  • Physical massing models tested under a heliodon at 55.7° north
  • Glazing sized to the plan, not the elevation
A Lumen interior detail in low afternoon light: reclaimed brick meeting fir joinery at a deep window reveal.

Built from what is already here

Sustainability on our drawings is a number, not an adjective. We set a carbon budget in the first month and design against it — reclaimed brick, Danish-grown timber, bolted connections that can come apart again. Every new building we have finished since 2019 has certified DGNB Gold or better.

  • A carbon budget agreed before the first plan is drawn
  • Reclaimed and bio-based materials specified by default
  • Structures bolted, not glued, so the parts survive the building
A lived-in Lumen room at dusk, warm interior light washing across brick, timber and glass.

Built to be lived in, not photographed

A house is not finished at the photo shoot. We design for the fifteenth winter — the timber that silvers evenly, the hall big enough for real coats and two bikes, the skylight you can actually reach to clean.

  • Post-occupancy visit at one year and at five
  • Fabric-first envelopes; low bills without a control panel
  • Maintenance manual written in plain English

Selected projects

Two of the four buildings in the archive. Each one has its own page — plans, materials, carbon budget and post-occupancy notes — under Projects.

Exterior of a completed Lumen house at blue hour, its glazed living room glowing above a still lap pool.
Long Water House — a lake house at Furesø, completed 2023
Daylight falling across the tactile materials of a Lumen interior — brick, fir and linen.
Kattegat House — a dune house in North Zealand, completed 2024
Late daylight moving across a finished Lumen interior, the room quiet and ready to be used.

Tell us about your site

We draw four or five buildings a year, and nearly every one starts the same way: send us the address, the light you like, and roughly when you would want to move in. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right studio for it.

Start a projectstudio@lumenarchitecture.dk

We reply to every enquiry within two working days.