The Juvet Landscape Hotel

We are all in search of new experiences, what’s even better is when we stumble across visionaries that create the remarkable. The idea of a landscape hotel emerged as an opportunity to exploit breathtaking scenery with minimal intervention, allowing locations which would otherwise be prohibited for reasons of conservation.

The Juvet Landscape Hotel is located at Valldal, near the town of Åndalsnes in north-western Norway. Passing tourists are attracted by a spectacular waterfall in a deep gorge near the road, «Gudbrandsjuvet». The client, Knut Slinning, is a local resident. In winter this high mountain pass road has to close at this point because of the heavy snow falls in the mountains, and the traffic is led on a considerably longer route by the sea, making the desolate ambience of the place clearer. The site for the hotel is a nature reserve. After extensive negotiations with conservation authorities, permission was eventually granted for a plan allowing a maximum of 28 rooms to be built without the need for rock blasting or changing the terrain.

Instead of a conventional hotel with guest rooms stacked together in one large building, the idea was to distribute the rooms throughout the site as small individual houses. Every house has one or two walls that are entirely built in glass. Through careful orientation every room gets its own exclusive view of piece of the landscape, changing with the season, the weather, and the time of day. No room looks into another so the rooms are experienced as private even though curtains are not used. Created to give the rooms an experienced space that is as large as the landscape. I think they succeeded!

images Knut Bry