Juvet Landscape Hotel by Jensen & Skodvin

Lies on a steep riverbank in West Norway, Juvet is the first landscape hotel in Europe, consists of nine individual and unique rooms that are spread out in the farmyard of Burtigarden farm at Alstad in Valldal.

Architects: Jensen & Skodvin
Location: Valldal, Norway
Photographs: Jensen & Skodvin, Courtesy of Juvet

The architects Jensen & Skodvin aimed to create a landscape hotel that blended in with the natural environment. The result is seven small cubes on stilts, with glass walls giving a splendid view of the river, valley, the courtyard, or the gorge below.

The idea of a landscape hotel emerged as an opportunity to exploit breathtaking scenery with minimal intervention, no two rooms are alike, but all the rooms have dark interiors to avoid taking attention away from the scenery.

Inspiration for the design:
We wanted to create rooms that does not have the conventional borders (the walls), but which has an experienced space that is as large as the landscape, may be three to four miles wide in this case. To create this we worked a lot with the windows so that as much as possible of the “bordering” or “enclosing” effect that a window and its framing usually gives were eliminated as small as possible. This is intended to give an effect of being in a large and grand landscape (not only looking at it), absolutely private, but also protected and warm.