Location: Asnæs, Denmark

Design Team: SAGA Space Architects

Lead Architect: Sebastian Aristotelis

Area: 35 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: Edi Cliff

Design Features: EcoNeo Summerhouse stands in Asnæs on the Danish island of Zealand. Within a compact 35-square-metre footprint, it accommodates the everyday rituals and holiday life of a family of four. SAGA Space Architects translates lessons from extreme-habitat research—spatial efficiency, resource awareness and human well-being—into a low-impact timber house for ordinary domestic use. Comfort comes not from additional floor area, but from making each part of the interior work more than once.

A central living space organises the plan. The ground floor combines the kitchen, bathroom, integrated storage, an indoor sauna and a dining table for as many as ten people, while two mezzanines provide the family's principal sleeping areas. Built-in furniture, vertical volume and long internal views take the place of conventional room divisions. Cooking, dining, resting and sleeping remain connected within one continuous section, yet each activity retains a distinct scale and degree of enclosure.

Large windows frame the surrounding landscape, while an operable mechanical skylight draws daylight and fresh air deep into the house. The living area extends onto a timber terrace, with the sauna placed beside an outdoor cold plunge so that bodily experience becomes part of the spatial sequence. Deep eaves, window seats and low corners create intimate places to pause within the otherwise open interior.

Oak shingles wrap the exterior and will change tone as they weather. Inside, plywood, Douglas fir, birch, oriented strand board and wood-fibre insulation establish a direct relationship between structure, furniture and finish. Every component was defined in a fully parametric model before CNC cutting and prefabrication. Digital production is used less as a formal display than as a precise way to coordinate a small building, reduce waste and shorten on-site assembly.

Circadian lighting and sensors for air quality and movement feed into a central operating system that coordinates lighting, windows, blinds and the sauna. The architects estimate that the house can reduce annual carbon emissions by roughly 80 per cent compared with an average new Danish summerhouse. EcoNeo is therefore both a family retreat and an inhabitable housing prototype, testing how limited space, biogenic materials, digital fabrication and environmental technology can work together without diminishing the quality of daily life.

Design Team: SAGA Space Architects was founded in 2018 by Danish architects Sebastian Aristotelis and Karl-Johan Sørensen. With offices in Copenhagen and Hanoi, the practice brings architecture, engineering, product design and software development into a single working structure. Its team of more than twenty people works across terrestrial housing, extreme environments and space architecture. EcoNeo was led by Sebastian Aristotelis.

The studio describes its approach as 'Terra-Tech': an exchange between landscape, material, climate and human perception on one side, and topology optimisation, generative design, 3D printing and digital assembly on the other. A fabrication workshop in Copenhagen supports full-scale testing, with CNC machining, laser cutting, additive manufacturing and electronics integrated into the design process.

Key projects include LUNARK, a simulated lunar habitat tested during a 100-day expedition in Greenland; the Circadian Light system installed on the International Space Station; and FLEXHab, a habitat prototype developed for the European Space Agency. The EcoNeo design team comprised Niklas Munk-Andersen, Marius Bendsen, Frederik With, Ive Santic and Samuel Charles Baratt, bringing the precision of extreme-environment design back to the familiar Danish summerhouse.