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Tree Hotel

In Harads, Sweden, a hotel is a growing group of individual tree Houses ("rooms"). Each is built in a pine tree and designed by a different architect.

Windows become frames that narrate the space

A home filled with peace, built with a few essential gestures and a palette of materials in harmony with the surrounding landscape. The anthracite-colored windows by Edilpiù take center stage in this visual narrative.

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The Treehotel is a year old. This now famous place to stay in Harads is almost as well known as the ice hotel which is rebuilt each year in Lapland in Sweden and is helping attract visitors to an extreme part of the planet. For those who still aren't familiar with it, the idea for the Treehotel was dreamed up several years ago by the owners of the small Brittas Pensionat hotel. Perhaps like many adults they regretted never having had a tree house, a symbol of freedom, as wonderfully embodied in the stories of Pippi Longstocking. Perhaps it's no coincidence that that strange little girl came from Sweden!

Aside from the initiative's psychoanalytical side, something which many people share and which has contributed to the success of the project, the most interesting aspect is the owners' transformation of the hotel into a true laboratory for contemporary architecture. The choice of designers has been fundamental. So far they have all been Scandinavians, selected from the most interesting architectural studios to have emerged over the last ten years.

Top: Bertil Harström (Inredningsgruppen), Birds Nest, above: Tham &Videgård Arkitekten, Mirror Cube.

It is possible to discern a common method, one founded on the habit of creating a dialogue with the natural world through all means available (forms, materials, internal spaces and openings), all elements that have made the Scandinavian approach to modernity distinctive. The results, however, have been very different. The first five rooms created in 2010 included a cube by Tham & Videgård Architects , which attempts to optically mimic nature by using mirrors on the outer walls. A bird's nest by Bertil Harström (Inredningsgruppen) which attempts the same, but this time with interlaced branches (though, internally, pure geometry applies). The Ufo room, again by Harström, expresses a desire for hyper-technological contrast. Cyrén & Cyrén's cabin is suspended from a bridge, and a bridge is used as a link between the ground and the red Blue Cone designed by Sandell Sandberg, a small lodging constructed with the traditional birch shingle technique, though red in colour.

The sixth room (under construction) has been designed by Marge Architects: A Room with a View (obviously not overlooking a courtyard). It involves three spaces suspended at different heights on slender steel columns; the rooms have been covered on the outside with dark, multilayered wood to reflect the light of the sun, leaving space on two sides for a window opening onto the view. Another room in the design phase (due to be built in February 2012) is by Sami Rintala, from Finland, who is engaged on a favourite theme—a small building daringly suspended in a natural setting, a foreign element, but one capable of tiptoeing gently into the landscape. In this case, we have an architectural fragment, a kind of beam that will contrast horizontally with the verticality of the trees and be supported on 4-6 high pine trunks (columns) —the trees can be found in the highest area of the hill. The windows will look south while at the two edges of the block there will be the balconies of the two communicating rooms positioned along the sides of the space. In the central area there will be a kitchen, a dining room and a bathroom. The external walls will be covered in panels of oxidised poplar, which is completely resistant to the Scandinavian climate.

Sandell Sandberg: Blue Cone in birch shingles painted red.

In the immediate future, it is planned to construct a shared building to house the saunas, the dressing-rooms, a shop (the idea is to sell products designed by the architects involved in the project) and a lounge area, designed by the Swede Thomas Sandell.

Given the huge international interest in this type of hotel, once this first generation of Scandinavian-designed rooms have been finished, the owners plan to open the design out to include architects from all round the world – and also probably to develop the brand by selling licences to open other Treehotels elsewhere. In this way, the hotels will continue to grow among the trees.

Arkitekten Marge: A Room with a View, under construction.

Madera: the soul of wood, nobly expressed

Madera crafts the very essence of wood through the ingenious process of precomposed veneering, resulting in surfaces of captivating visual harmony and inherent sustainability. From flawlessly coordinated color palettes to intricate inlays that whisper stories, each door stands as a genuine tribute to the natural world.

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Tree Hotel

In Harads, Sweden, a hotel is a growing group of individual tree Houses ("rooms"). Each is built in a pine tree and designed by a different architect.

Windows become frames that narrate the space

Madera: the soul of wood, nobly expressed

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