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.