Peek Inside a Soaring Architectural Wonder in Sweden

14.10.2024 - 21:23 / cntraveler.com

I traveled to Sweden's Dalarna and returned home with a horse. It stands about five inches tall, with a pleasing curve of the muzzle and dainty fetlocks, though an unkind person might say it looks bovine from a certain angle. I whittled it while sitting on a log beneath tall spruces, warmed by the fire that Alfred Blomberg, a local farmer, had assembled in moments. As we flicked curls of pine across the floor with our blades, he told me the sort of things you tell a person while sitting around a fire. How the lake behind us freezes so solid in winter a horse could gallop across it; how, in summer, he takes his cows to mountain pasture to give them a holiday; and how he was a slingshot champion in his youth, carving his own catapult and traveling all around Sweden. It was a scene that could have taken place at any time in the past century.

“I just wanted a spectacular moment,” cofounder Mike Lind says of the barn's giant window, “I sketched the window on a piece of paper and a local welder made it. It weighs more than two tons."

A few hours north of Stockholm, this is Sweden’s Huckleberry Finn country. Barnland. Driving here takes you past a flip book of silver birch and lakes, pines and lakes. The Dalarna region is the gateway to the Scandinavian Mountains, for winter sports; but most come in the summer, melting into forest cabins and villages to hike through woods and swim in lakes. In June there are midsommar festivals garlanded with wild flowers—mercifully unlike Midsommar, save for the maypoles that stand tall in nearly every village. And at its centre is Lake Siljan, a crater lake formed by a large meteor that hit 377 million years ago, turning the earth here upside down.

One of the barn's two simple bedrooms, this one on the mezzanine

The kitchen, too, is functional and without frills.

Dalarna is where Stockholmers come to reconnect with the landscape, and perhaps to absorb an elemental form of pure Sweden-ness. The horse I carved is a Dala horse: painted orange-red with a colorful bridle and sold in craft shops all over the country, a regional quirk that became a national symbol over the centuries. And if you’ve ever wondered why almost every Swedish house is painted red, the answer lies in the mine at Falun, which supplied copper to most of Europe and made Sweden rich. When its heyday ended after a pit collapse in the 17th century, the existing production of iron-rich red paint—originally used because it made wood look like red brick—was stepped up. Perhaps that meteor brought some cosmic good fortune to the region.

An industrial metal wheel allows the massive window to rotate slowly upward into the horizontal position—bringing the outside in.

Our red-painted barn lies in Sunnanhed, a village