By Hannah Schenker
Do you sometimes fall down the ‘natural living’ rabbit hole on the internet, looking at yurts and cob buildings and earthships and the like? Dreaming of living more closely with nature in a creative dwelling? Most of us live in fairly temperate climes – we could realistically live in these kinds of creative homes quite easily. But in the arctic circle? A family in northern Norway have done just that – building a three-level cob home and enclosing it in a geodesic dome – making it possible to not only live where they do, but grow food as well.
Hjertefølgerne / The Heart Followers from Deadline Media on Vimeo.
Benjamin and Ingrid Hjertefølger began creating this incredible home and way of life in 2013 on the island of Sandhornøya in northern Norway. The family of six not only live in warmth, they are able to sustain themselves with the gardens, as the cob home is topped with a geodesic solar dome. This allows them to live in freezing temperatures, in a part of the world where for three months a year there is no sun at all.
Like in an earthship, all of their grey and black water is repurposed and used somewhere in the structure – fertilizing and watering their plants, for example.
After more than three years living there, they told Inhabitat: “The feeling we get as we walk into this house is something different from walking in to any other house. The atmosphere is unique. The house has a calmness; I can almost hear the stillness. It is hard to explain. But it would have been impossible getting this feeling from a house someone else has planned and built for us, or a house with corners and straight lines.”
