Allotment owner Mie Sparre has publicly backed Vejle Kommune’s demand that oversized colony-garden houses be reduced to legal size. She says owners who disagree with the local protest face social pressure.
DR reported Sunday that Sparre, who has a kolonihave in one of the affected areas of Vejle, supports the municipality’s enforcement of its local plans. She lives in an apartment in the city with her husband and uses the garden for recreation in the summer half of the year. She spoke to TV Syd the previous weekend before giving her account to DR.
Her plot measures 800 square meters. The house itself is 15 square meters, her husband’s workshop 20 square meters, and a separate toilet building 12 square meters, for a total of 47 square meters built. Plot size has been used locally as an argument for building large houses, an argument Sparre rejects.
Lawsuit and enforcement
About 100 house owners in the area have joined together to hire lawyer Knud Foldschack, with the aim of having the local plans overturned. There are almost 1,000 allotment gardens in Vejle in total. Per DR, the municipality says 150 houses remain clearly too large under the new rules.
The plans allow a house of up to 50 square meters, plus up to 30 square meters of annexes and similar structures. TV 2 reported that the plans were adopted in February 2024, after preparatory work began around 2019. As noted by TV 2, the municipality later found that almost half of Vejle’s 974 allotment houses were too large.
TV 2 also reported that Vejle Kommune began issuing orders in 2025, following inspections carried out with drones in the autumn of 2024. In earlier reporting this month, DR said eight houses have been legalized after their owners reduced them, and that the municipality is in dialogue with nine more owners.
Social control
Sparre described a form of social control in the area, where those who do not follow the majority feel frowned upon. According to her, it is a small community, and many keep quiet rather than break with the owners leading the opposition to the municipality.
She has had the allotment for six years and visited the area before that. Sparre said many people in the area have long known that the buildings were illegal, and that the kolonihave law applies regardless of what neighbors have built. She said a colony garden should be a place for leisure, not year-round living.
Sparre also said that owners will not lose their gardens if their houses are cut down, since they can be housed elsewhere and still come every day. DR presented her criticism to Lykke Juhl, chair of Kolonisternes Haveforening, which has sued Vejle Kommune. Juhl declined to be interviewed.
