How to be Danish

“We started to have car-free days. Not because of a love of mankind, but because of a lack of petroleum. Everybody rejoiced because it was wonderful having car-free Sundays. And they realised it would be clever to go back to bicycles.”

Denmark has the second-largest homes in Europe (in terms of square metres per capita), and why the Danes are so concerned with making those homes look nice. Since restaurants are so expensive (thanks to a 25% tax on food), many Danes prefer to spend their evenings at home.

Danish concept of hygge. Pronounced roughly “hoo-guh”, hygge does not have a direct equivalent in English. It refers to the warm state of relaxation in which Danes find themselves when they’re sitting around a fire with friends, or having a beer in their beach house (another Danish mainstay) on the North Sea in the summer. It is often loosely translated as “cosiness”, but this seems both too broad and yet too specific a translation.

“That’s one of the differences between Denmark and a lot of other countries. We are proud of our design heritage. A lot of people will own his 7 Chair. They might have bought it reduced and repainted it or reworked it, but most people buy an original. It’s something we like our country to be associated with. Design is in our cultural DNA.”

They’re sometimes called the Latinos of Scandinavia – but drunk pedestrians will still wait patiently for a green man at four in the morning.

Noma, a restaurant that stands barely 20 metres from the moorings of the Nordic Food Lab. Named the world’s best restaurant for the past three years in a row

Arne Jacobsen was not a furniture designer. He was an architect.

During the 90s, the government took away this subsidy and gave it to the people who bought the turbines instead. They agreed to buy back any unused wind energy from the turbine owners at a price that never dropped below a fixed minimum. This encouraged communities to invest in turbines that created the most power – and in turn prompted the manufacturers themselves to create better turbines.

“This is business like any other business,” says Hermansen, who I chat to on the ferry over from the mainland. “If we can provide cheap energy to compete with fossil fuel, then even the most conservative local citizen will say green energy is good. It is more reliable and cheaper, because we can see our prices going up all the time. When we started in 1998, oil was $30 per barrel. Ten years later, it was $130. So the people who invested between 1998 and 2001 saved so much money in the next ten years. We could show that this was a real business project, not just a hippy project.”

In the 70s, Denmark was particularly hard hit by the oil crisis, which made Danes anxious to find a long-term replacement for fossil fuel. With all their flat land, wind power seemed a sensible option.