Take a look inside Peter Ibsen’s dreamy interiors: “People always say, ‘How can you live like this with kids?’ but you just do”

There is something in the Scandinavian psyche that manifests itself in the love of a summer house. An hour or two outside a Nordic capital, surrounded by lush greenery, often with easy access to a body of water, we can balance our obsession with nature with our love of simplistic design. Here, wooden walls soften sounds to hums and whispers.

The summer house sits in stark contrast to the ideal city apartment, where clean white walls roll onto glossy wooden floors. It is a strictly curated way of living, spotted with designer furniture and decorated with minimal abstract paintings. If the summer home is an escape, the apartment is sometimes more like a showroom.

Peter Ibsen knows this dichotomy well. On first meeting, it would be easy to put Ibsen – gallery owner, art collector, staunch design purist – in a box, but the 50-year-old founder of Copenhagen’s Sunday-S Gallery is much more than his sparse Danish aesthetic. Obsessed with the creative disobedience of the contemporary art world, Ibsen has come to dedicate himself to nurturing international talent, whose work more often than not winds up in his own ever-expanding collection. It is less nine-to-five and more of an all-consuming, dedicated purpose.

While the gallerist’s expansive central Copenhagen apartment – also the star of his popular Instagram account – is certainly impressive, it’s his other property, located on the island of Zealand in Rørvig, about an hour’s drive from the city, that maintains a special place in his heart. Together, Ibsen’s homes tap into that Danish desire to exist both in the capital of cool and in the quiet wilderness, standing where sea meets nothing but sky.

Though he is someone who thrives at moving one hundred miles per hour, Ibsen is no stranger to the mystic power of the summer house. He feels that many important decisions from his life could only have been made in his second home. “You feel you have been away forever,” he says, of being in his summer house. “You do things differently. You eat, sleep, think and have other routines.”

But today we are in the city, standing in Ibsen’s north-facing apartment on a leafy street in Østerbro. The afternoon sunlight is sifting in, bathing his apartment in a hazy glow. “In the previous apartment there was a lot of direct sunlight, which is nice for some but not for me because of my art,” Ibsen says. “This apartment is facing north which means you don’t get any of the downward sun which is per fect for the light and perfect for the art, which means I don’t have to have blinds either.” Ibsen, his wife and children moved in two and a half years ago.

Entering Ibsen’s home, towering canvases by the likes of Alex Da Corte and wall sculptures of bent sheet metal by Dorian Gaudin lead towards a space that cultivate modern definitions of what constitutes art. And that is exactly how Ibsen likes it. “For me, all the works in my collection are breaking the rules of what a painting is,” he says. It was a single painting by German artist Gregor Hildebrandt – abstract, printed in black and white – that made him rethink his entire approach. He sold his collection of colourful Danish paintings and started fresh. “Everything then had to be abstract, minimal, processed,” he says.

With this double-role as both family home and private gallery – international collectors are welcome over by invitation – the role of furniture is somewhat redefined. “I would rather not have a chair or a sofa but would rather have a painting,” Ibsen says. Still, the furniture that fills his home are works of sculptural presence in themselves. Granted the luxury of space, each item can breathe and hold its own resonance within his airy apartment.

The Afra & Tobias Scarpa sofa, purchased in Italy, becomes as much a work of art as anything on the walls while a Steltman chair by Gerrit Rietveld is perched atop the raised flooring of the living room. “I love this piece, because it’s a chair but you don’t want to sit on it because it doesn’t look that comfortable,” Ibsen says. “I believe it was Finn Juhl who said, ‘I would rather rip my back than my eyes'. Which is so true.”

With all this directional design, it doesn’t initially read as a home for a family to unwind and relax. “People always say, ‘How can you live like this with kids?’ but you just do,” he says. “They get used to it, they like it.” Fair enough – who needs a television and a battered armchair when you have several Peter Shire works and more artbooks than all the museums in Copenhagen?

In the kitchen, a cluster of seats including three Colombo dining armchairs by Matthew Hilton for De La Espada encircle a round dining table by Charles and Ray Eames. A Frama Chair 01 in natural wood is signed by the artist Marie Házard, an act undertaken after she spilled some wine on it. Above, a twisting steel structure hangs over the kitchen island, designed by Nicolaj Mentze. Its purpose is foremost a light, but it does double duty as a freestanding artwork when not in use.

With collectors invited through the doors for personal previews, friends and fellow creatives talking until the early hours, Ibsen’s city residence enables a continuous cycle of activity at an ever-increasing speed. It is the role of his summer house, however, to apply the brakes and let time go slow, for a while at least. Whether or not Ibsen chooses to embrace this change of pace is another matter. “When I go to the summer house, I always promise myself, ‘Now I’m not going to do Instagram, I’m not going to do anything – I’m just gonna take my phone and throw it away’,” he says. “But then after 10 seconds, I do 80 times more than I do here.”

While it might not enforce a complete freeze of habits, the summer house certainly allows for Ibsen to seek new ways of seeing, thinking and decision-making. For the Ibsen clan, the summer space carries a role of cosiness and comfort at its core. “It’s much more hygge, you know? I love the light there. Everything has to be much more simple,” he says. “I would never have a TV [in the city], but we have one in the summer house. And there’s a nice comfy sofa, but here I would never have it. Never.”

Compared to the extremely thoughtful interior design that pervades his city home, Ibsen’s summer house has its own set of rules dictated by the space and its desired sensations. It’s much more organic – intuitive, even. “ We put things where it just feels right. The sofa is where it is because it feels right,” he says. “In the summer house we have long lines and long views.”

In Rørvig, a vintage Børge Mogensen shaker table captures the afternoon sun, with Mogens Koch folding chairs pulled up around it. While the canvases in the city home make declarative statements, those in the summer house – from the Matthew Feyld piece in the kitchen to the Nil Bleibtreu painting that faces the table banquette –nestle quietly amongst the pine wood walls. In both homes, there is a personal touch. A papier-maché head, created by his daughter, standing proud in the city apartment is countered by a cluster of illustrated stones scattered across the windowsill in the summer house.

While there are defined roles each home can embody, subconsciously or otherwise, principles can also come to fill a space with meaning. For Ibsen, while each home might pervade its own purpose and energy, there are a set of rules that apply to both: “Simplicity, living with less. Natural light.”

While the summer house and the city home may remain a Janus-like separation in their design and idealism, perhaps they are two halves of the same whole. The physical embodiment of the ideal Scandinavian lifestyle.