01. The corner joint holds
As the Middle Ages begin, the longhouses give way to log houses. Horizontal logs are locked into each other at the corners – the joints – and the wall carries itself. The technique suits the forested parts of the country perfectly and is used for everything from dwellings, barns and storehouses to churches.
A log house can be taken apart, moved and rebuilt, and this has been done on a large scale. Many farms in our open-air museums have been moved there from other parts of the country. The oldest surviving log buildings in Sweden are medieval – the church storehouse in Älvdalen was built after 1285.
The design of the corner joints – dovetails, double notches, saddle notches – varies between regions and periods, and becomes a clue to a building's age for anyone who knows where to look.
In the far south they build their own way. In the forests along the 17th-century border with Denmark, walls are made of planks, not logs – two from each trunk. They are only four inches thick but up to seven metres long, with smooth faces and sharp joints. It is joinery as much as log building. Further north the wall is six to eight inches thick and the log rarely longer than six and a half metres.
This is also where the high-loft cottage (högloftstuga) stands. A low cottage is squeezed between two tall storehouse lofts. The cottage has a turf roof, the lofts have shingles, and the bare log walls are coated in red tar. In the middle rises a whitewashed chimney. Around 1820–40 they stop being built. Many are rebuilt instead: the range is cut and pulled apart, the cottage is raised and everything ends up under one roof. 79 high-loft cottages survive, 28 on their original site.
The cladding often comes later. At the Örnanäs farm in Skåne the red-tarred walls are not clad until the 1860s – at the same time as the windows grow four times larger.
02. How to spot it
- 1.Horizontal logs locked together at the corners
- 2.Visible corners – protruding log ends or flush dovetails
- 3.In southern Sweden: thin, smooth plank walls instead of logs
- 4.Often clad and painted red at a later date
- 5.A low stone plinth
03. The giveaway
The corner joint. How the logs are joined at the corner tells you where and when the house was built – look under the cladding, if you are allowed.
Read the façade
- The corner joint
- Horizontal logs
04. Where to see it
- The church storehouse in Älvdalenbuilt after 1285
- Skansen, Stockholmlog houses moved from all over the country
- The decorated farmhouses of Hälsinglandlarge log-built farms
- Kyrkhultsstugan, Skansena high-loft cottage from Blekinge
- Örnanäs cultural reserve, Osbya high-loft cottage from the 1810s, rebuilt in the 1850s
05. Often confused with
Vernacular. Vernacular describes the whole folk building and craft tradition; log building is the technique most vernacular houses were built with.
Sources
- Nationalencyklopedin (ne.se)
- Gunnar Almevik: Byggnaden som kunskapskälla (University of Gothenburg, 2012)
- Swedish Wikipedia: "Långhus (byggnad)", "Härbre"