Month: May 2020

I’m sitting alone in the cozy living room on the first floor of Björkåsen at Glava, listening to birds’ singing in the trees outside. The mood is lovely. The sun is shining from a bright blue sky, the birds are chirping and there’s a mellow rustling in the birch trees outside the window. Apart from that, everything else is quiet.

We’ve been here for an eventful 1.5 weeks now, having taken possession of the property on 20 May 2020. Since we took over we’ve been dealing with a huge unexpected water leak (thankfully not in the mansion itself, but in one of the smaller buildings on the property, but still.. this was not at all included in our modest public employee budgets, to say the least. Oh well..), have cleared out dirt and old leafs and twigs from the gutters, cut a lot of lawn, tried to find doors that fit the spacious living rooms on the ground floor and generally gotten to know the property (electricity, plumbing, etc.). Obviously we’re not through with getting to know the property yet; there is just soo much to see – huge living rooms with large windows to the east, west and north, three stone staircases – the large main one in the middle and a spiral staircase at each end of the building to the south and north.

Old tales have it there’s a ghost here, too, but my husband and I haven’t seen any 🙂 I should probably add in the interest of full disclosure that neither of us believe in the supernatural and apparently ghosts only show themselves to people who believe in them, which is really very polite when you think about it. I do, however, understand how people could come to believe it, what with the long dark corridors and stone staircases.

In addition to the vast manorial building of 2,100 m2 living area (!) and an additional 700 m2 basement, there are five other residential buildings and a huge barn, a stable and a smaller outbuilding likely used for provisions in the old days. All of the buildings are surprisingly well kept, actually, which is nice. The property area is 13.35 hectares which is vast! There’s a paddock, an old soccer field, huge pastures and fields and even a small woodland. We have not gone through it all – planning on taking a hike along the exterior borders this weekend!

The park surrounding the main building is surprisingly varied. We have found a number of different woodland species. The crown of the park is the large and lustrous maple tree to the south of the main building; in addition there are several sizeable maples, birches, silver firs, rowans, elms and lilac bushes. We have also to my great delight found what we think is an oak tree. I’m stoked!

I have to say, impressive and stately as the main building may be, at this delightful time at the end of May, when nature is exploding with life and colour everywhere, I am even more in awe of the park than any one building on the property. I’ve attached a few photos taken over the past few days to show you the current mood 🙂

My husband and I had been looking for a holiday home for about a year’s time. The requirements and dreams were plenty, and, as is often the case, rather difficult to adjust to one another. We wanted a large stone manor with high ceilings, large windows and a beautiful large park in a dreamy location in the countryside. In our country of origin Norway, such great houses are very few and far between.

However, we cast a rather wide net in the hope of finding something that could suit our wallets as well as our dreams – we looked in Sweden, France, Italy, Portugal. Several times we fell in love with a dilapidated overgrown château in France – only to come to our senses and realise we would not be able to handle a project of such magnitude, what with the traveling distance, the state of disrepair and the ginormous property taxes.

After about a year in search of The House we started losing hope. I said to my husband: – why cannot our dream house pop up in the Arvika area (which is the Swedish town closest to Oslo)? And my husband responded: the manors in this area are all wood panelled houses. The grand houses in stone masonry are closer to Stockholm on the east coast. And so it would seem: the few manors that came up for sale near Oslo were invariably from the 1700s with wood panels and low ceilings.

March 2020 came and the coronavirus hit Europe. All of a sudden the borders were closed and people huddled in their homes, afraid of what the future might hold. We wrote our French broker that we did not foresee any travel to France in the foreseeable future. On 17 March 2020 Norway closed its borders to Sweden for the first time since time immemorial.

And there it was. On the very same day as Norway closed its borders to Sweden Glava manor was entered for sale on hemnet.se. And we fell instantly in love. It was all there: the lovely large stone house with huge windows that let the light through, high ceilings aspiring heavenwards and a large and stately park – all located in the Arvika area and for a price we could afford. This was the property that could house our dreams.

So we let corona be corona and border control be border control and traveled to Sweden to look at it. The penalty was 14 days of quarantine. The prize: our very own manor a short drive from Oslo.

Note: Glava Gård does not only offer an unfathomable 2,100 square metres of living space. It also has no less than four annexes of about 2,000 square metres of rental space – which will come in handy considering the astronomical electricity bills that are bound to come.

On 20 May 2020 the manor will be ours. Watch this space.