“I watched that [Quentin] Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and there’s a point where DiCaprio says something like, ‘Once you own a house, you’re really here. You’ve decided to become one of the tribe,’” says Danish actor and Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who this summer made that declaration when he, his wife, Nukâka Coster-Waldau, and two teenage daughters moved into their first home in Los Angeles, an Edenic three-bedroom in the Hollywood Hills. “And there is some truth to that: It’s a little more mature now, it’s official. I have been working out of L.A. for 15 years, and I can’t hide it anymore.”
Over the course of the hit show, HBO put the actor up in West Hollywood hotels or houses in the hills when he needed to be in town, but after “I lost my day job”—as Coster-Waldau amiably describes the end of the series—the housing ended as well. The family still lives primarily in Denmark, but Coster-Waldau saw the opportunity for a second home. What he sought was a three-bedroom with a pool, “because that’s terribly exotic for us from Scandinavia,” he says of the latter. And the most compelling features of the flat-roofed, tiered midcentury home they ended up with were around the pool: a lush backyard and garden on a steep hill, with a view. “That’s what I fell for,” he says.
Coster-Waldau says he wouldn’t have chosen it, “but now that it’s there, I absolutely love that desk.” (It’s by Jaime Hayon.) He cites this as an example of knowing when to hand it over to experts, as he does on red carpets with his stylist, Ilaria Urbinati. “I don’t understand that world,” he says. “So I trust the professionals.”
Still, while the exteriors are Southern California through and through, the home is not actually much of a departure for the architecture buff, who hired a good friend from Copenhagen, Lonnie Castle, and fellow designer Birgitta Nellemann to handle the very Scandinavian interiors. “I was doing a FaceTime with a friend, showing him the house, and he was like, ‘This is pretty much like your house in Denmark.’ I was like, ‘Nooo! It’s nothing like my house in Denmark, what are you talking about?!’” Coster-Waldau says, laughing. “But there are similarities: We’ve also got a flat roof, the same lamps, and red bricks in our backyard there.” For him a little continuity is appealing. Simplicity is too. His desire for a peacefully minimalist environment came from feeling that their longtime primary residence was too full of things. “Every two years we go, ‘OK, now we really have to get rid of stuff,’” he says. “So we do, and then things creep back in.”
Coster-Waldau left much of the design up to Castle and Nellemann, who shared ideas via Skype and email while he was filming in Canada. Castle is the concept and culture manager for Danish furnishings company &Tradition, which holds patents for classic furniture designs. Several lamps, the living room sofa, and an armchair are from the brand. They’re accompanied by diverse global names: Japan’s Isamu Noguchi, Spain-based Jaime Hayon, Italy’s Flos, America’s Norman Cherner, and London’s Michael Anastassiades. A bit of home for Nukâka comes in the form of a dining room photograph by artist Henrik Saxgren of a massive iceberg trapped in sea ice in Greenland, reminding them all of their trips to her homeland.
