If you drive out of Denmark, across the Øresund Bridge into Sweden, you’ll immediately notice two things.
One, there are a lot fewer bicycles, even in big cities like Stockholm and Malmö that have bicycle lanes. Sweden’s more of a car country.
Two, you’ll see small wooden houses all over the countryside, almost always painted red. The red is called Falun Red, and the iron that makes it red was originally a byproduct of the local copper mines.
The wood for the houses comes from Sweden’s big forests.
Denmark doesn’t have many wooden houses. Its forests are small.
What Denmark has is brick. The Danish brick.
95% of Danish houses have brick facades
About 95% of Danish single-family houses have brick facades, and so do most Danish churches, and schools, and city halls. Sometimes the bricks are hidden behind whitewashing, but they’re still there.
The brick’s only real competition is concrete. The new apartment blocks going up in the trendy cities often have concrete facades, but even there, developers sometimes cover those facades with flat little tiles that look like bricks.
Bricks were known as monk stones
Danish people like bricks.
And this affection goes all the way back to the 12th century, when bricks were known as monk stones, munkesten, because it was primarily monks who made them. Denmark had a lot of cloisters and monasteries at the time.