Dappled sunlight dances on a pathway of wood planks, coaxing visitors up through a narrow forest passage. The endpoint is obscured by a stand of tall pines with swimsuits dangling from their branches. It could be the entrance to a treetop walk or a path to a secret swimming hole.

In a way, it’s both. The passageway leads to the retreat that Tomas Haeger, a management consultant, and Tina Linde, an organizational psychologist, share with their two children on the island of Tjörn off the west coast of Sweden. The home, located within an hour’s drive of their primary residence in Gothenburg, is a cross between a tree house and a beach house. “We wanted it to look summer, breathe summer, and feel summer,” says Tomas.

Although the Swedish coast is known for its rustic red cottages, when the couple began looking for their summer home, they had in mind something quite different—a stripped-down modern space with high architectural standards, plus a jetty nearby for their boat and a launch for paddleboarding. And they wanted a sea view.

The property they found, a steeply sloping section of rock looking out over a forested ravine to the 19th-century cast-iron Pater Noster lighthouse, provided the setting. Two neighboring houses, a pair of simple boxes, provided the inspiration.

The adjacent residences were designed by STEG Arkitekter, a studio founded by Jenny Stening and Karolina Hegen in 2010. The two had studied together at Chalmers University of Technology a decade earlier and had then pursued independent architectural careers in England and the West Indies before returning to Sweden. Tomas and Tina eagerly enlisted their help, inviting the duo to walk the site with them.

“They wanted the feeling of being up in the treetops and asked that none of the natural landscape around the house be disturbed,” says Hegen.

To capture that feeling, the home, built by Joo Bygg, is set atop pine stilts whose metal fittings were drilled directly into the site’s highest point, a craggy outcropping. On the south side, it is elevated nine and a half feet above grade.

“We didn’t use too many materials, yet there’s a feeling of refinement and elegance.”
–Karolina Hegen, architect

Another of the couple’s stipulations was that the house require minimal upkeep. What the family didn’t want was an ongoing maintenance project. “No landscaping, no paint, nothing that takes time,” says Tomas. “Since it’s a summer house, it didn’t need much insulation,” adds Hegen, “so we could have thinner walls and a lighter build.”

The home’s exterior is clad in treated-but-unpainted tongue-and-groove fir planks, and the interior is composed almost entirely of marine-grade plywood, from the built-in beds to the shelving. Even the shower walls in the bathroom are plywood. “The inspector thought we were crazy,” says Tomas, with a laugh. “He thought at first the builders hadn’t finished the job.”

Perhaps the most distinctive feature, though, is the layout: three discrete volumes joined by breezeways and a sloping roof and measuring roughly 900 square feet in total. One unit is for socializing and consists of the kitchen and lounge. Another is the family sleeping quarters. The third houses the guest room and, in classic Nordic fashion, a sauna.

When the large sliding doors between the units are closed, the breezeways can double as covered outdoor rooms. A deck runs around the perimeter, evoking the prow of a ship at one end with its elevated vantage point over the ravine and the water in the distance. Altogether, the terraces are roughly equal in size to the interiors. “The house has the same feeling inside and out,” says Tina.

And when all the doors are open, one can walk straight through the house from outside to inside to outside again—90 feet from end to end. Just like the gusts of wind that fly across the island and out to sea.

Project Credits:

Architect: STEG Arkitekter AB

General Contactor: JOO Bygg AB

Civil Engineer: Projektsystem i väst AB