The most imaginative 4.5 square metres in the house
The hems is not a bedroom. That’s the point.
The most misunderstood square metres in any small house, and why a sommerhus is allowed to be playful.
Updated June 2026
Every floor plan of a small house has one. A dotted line above the bathroom or the entrance, labelled hems. And every buyer’s imagination does the same thing with it: turns it into a second bedroom. A double bed, a reading lamp, maybe a little window. Then they stand in the finished house, look up, and realize the truth. There is often just a metre or so of headroom up there. You do not walk into a hems. You crawl.
Some brands let the misunderstanding stand, because a “sleeping loft” sells better than a crawl space. We think the opposite is true. The hems is one of the best ideas in Danish small-house building, but only if you are honest about what it is. It is not a bedroom. It is a den. And a den is something a house with five bedrooms cannot offer.
Start with the children, because they understood the hems before anyone else. Adults want rooms: standing height, a door, a place for a wardrobe. Children want caves. A platform under the roof, reached by a ladder, with a ceiling low enough to touch from a mattress, is not a compromised bedroom to a seven-year-old. It is the best place in the house. It is where cousins sleep in a row during summer holidays, where the flashlight comes out after bedtime, where the rules of the grown-up floor do not quite reach. No one ever fought over who gets the master bedroom. Children fight over the hems.
It earns its keep in quieter ways too. It is the overflow bed for the one guest too many, perfectly comfortable for a night or two, which is exactly how long guests should stay. It is the reading spot you climb to on a rainy afternoon. And for the rest of the year it is the most honest storage in the house: duvets, winter clothes, the boxes a 40 m² house has no closet for. A small house does not need more rooms. It needs places, and a hems is a place.
The year-round home keeps getting more serious: optimized layouts, walk-in closets, a home office. The sommerhus is the one house in your life that is allowed to stay a little childish. Eating outside because you can. Sand on the floor that nobody mentions. A ladder in the living room. The hems is where the house admits it is not trying to be an apartment in the city. Build it away and you have saved nothing, but lost something.
A few practical notes, since the hems lives in the building code too:
- To count as a hems and stay outside your registered floor area, it may measure at most 4.5 m² and must stand in open connection with the room below, reached by a ladder or a steep loft stair.
- If children sleep there, a proper railing is not optional.
- And since warm air collects under the roof, an openable window or vent nearby makes summer nights up there far better.
Get these right and the hems is free space, in every sense: it counts toward nothing and gives back daily.
So read the floor plan honestly. The hems will not replace a bedroom. It will do something a bedroom never could.
Planning a build and wondering how to use a small footprint well?
Our certified architect designs within Danish sommerhus regulations every day. Book a consultation and we take it from there.
*General guidance only. Building rules vary by municipality and plot. Always verify before beginning any project.
