Noma’s Rene Redzepi finds his Copenhagen dream home
It took many years for Danish chef Rene Redzepi and his wife to buy their dream: a 17th-century former blacksmith’s workshop a few steps from his Noma restaurant, which is frequently cited as one of the best restaurants in the world. Now that Redzepi has announced he is closing Noma next year, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his new enterprise will be just a 10-minute bike ride from his freshly renovated home.
The squat, cottage-like structure houses five bedrooms and two bathrooms in its 223sq m and has access to a roughly quarter-acre garden shared with a city block of community-minded neighbours. It’s in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn neighbourhood — a historic, canal-lined district that has undergone radical gentrification but remains stubbornly bohemian. Known for its superb restaurants, as well as its soup kitchens, the area manages to be raffish and refined, owing its distinctive atmosphere to long-time residents who Redzepi, like just about everyone in the city, refers to as “old hippies”.
The location is ideal, he says. A few minutes’ walk from Noma, it allows him to “spend mornings at home”. In the early evening, he can come back and put his daughters — aged 7, 4 and 1 — to bed, then quickly return to the restaurant, where his staff of 60 prepares 18-course dinners for 40 diners who pay about $US420 (almost $600) apiece for the fixed menu, including wine pairings.
Noma will serve its last meal on New Year’s Eve 2016, and Redzepi’s new farm and eating establishment, set to open in 2017, will be located a little more than a kilometre away on Refshaleoen, an island-like protuberance that once housed a thriving shipyard. The home’s centrepiece is a newly constructed, customised kitchen area that has streamlined oak fittings and a massive fireplace equipped with an open grill. Appliances are concealed with the exception of a conspicuous Electrolux inductive stove. There is no microwave.
“I wouldn’t know what to do with one,” says Redzepi, 37, who says his wife does much of the cooking. Nadine Levy Redzepi, 30, worked with her husband until her recent maternity leave and now is embarking on a career as a cookbook author, using her kitchen as a laboratory.
The low-ceilinged room has great charm and may be in the right location, but natural light is scarce — a common problem in older Scandinavian houses, where thick walls and small windows can lead to gloomy interiors. The couple installed nearly 30 LED lights in the open-plan kitchen and living area. They often switch on their lights in broad daylight. Does Redzepi ever miss the high ceilings and natural light of the couple’s previous home? “I like this better,” he says. “I grew up in small apartments in Copenhagen and small rooms in Macedonia. It’s better for me.”
Redzepi was born in Copenhagen but spent part of his childhood in Yugoslavia, moving with his family back to Denmark in the late 1980s, just as the country was about to descend into civil war. As a trainee, he led a typically peripatetic life, holed up in often dingy apartments while apprenticing at noted restaurants such as Spain’s El Bulli and California’s the French Laundry. Noma opened in 2003.
From 2011 until the recent move, Redzepi and his family lived in a large rented apartment. Though it was on a scenic, tree-lined plaza, the place was surrounded by restaurants that Redzepi writes off as mediocre tourist traps. “I hated it,” he says. “I didn’t feel at home there.”
What did feel like home — the 17th-century row house — was too expensive. It went on the market in 2013 for $US1.2 million, Levy Redzepi says. They put in a lower offer and didn’t expect to prevail.
Redzepi says his family was competing against two higher bids. The sellers, wanting to find suitable new owners, interviewed Levy Redzepi, and the Redzepis won with their plan to create a multigenerational home. Levy Redzepi’s mother occupies a ground-floor bedroom while the rest of the family sleeps upstairs. “And they loved the idea that we were a young family, as they themselves had been when they moved in,” adds Levy Redzepi.
The couple paid about $US1.01m. They got the keys on April 1, then embarked on about two months of renovations. They didn’t need to buy new furniture, finding a place for the mixture of designer and flea-market pieces they already owned, but they put a lot of thought into the kitchen.
As a famous chef, Redzepi gets to stay in luxury when he travels, like a recent sojourn at Tokyo’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, when Noma opened a pop-up restaurant in Japan earlier this year. Next year he will move temporarily to Australia to open Noma for a 10-week stint at Sydney’s Barangaroo development.
What does he consider his first real adult home? “Here,” he says, looking around his new kitchen.
Source: The Australian / The Wall Street Journal, J.S. Marcus, 26th September 2015
Originally published as: Noma’s Rene Redzepi finds his Copenhagen dream home
