A luxury hotel in Sweden’s treetops

The Mirrorcube, one of the four architect-designed Treehotel cabins

Many hotels around the world offer guests the chance to get closer to nature, but only this one, in the forests of Swedish Lapland, lets them disappear within it.

It’s 3am and, rather than sleep, I’m standing watching the early morning sun play on the branches outside my suite – a self-contained, mirror-clad cube, clamped to the trees four metres above ground. I’m utterly isolated, and from the ground outside, the cube is almost invisible. The silence is intoxicating.

I’m staying at the Treehotel, Sweden’s most startling hotel, and also its newest, (having opened last weekend). My suite is one of four architect-designed tree houses in the forest outside Harads, a small town on the banks of the Lule River. Each tree house is unique and there are plans to build another 20 over the next five years.

Although the idea of tree houses might carry connotations of the hippy-ish and the basic, that simply isn’t the case. These are upmarket and stylish, with a price tag of more than £300 a night. In providing novelty in a natural environment, the Treehotel is a successor to the wildly successful Icehotel, built from snow and ice every winter 160 miles north of here near Kiruna. It is also part of the “landscape hotel” trend – stylishly designed luxury hotels placed in the middle of nowhere, not so much for their proximity to hiking or other outdoor activities as for the views from their (usually) floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Perhaps we’re a little crazy but it helps – if not, we would never have got started,” Britta Lindvall, who owns the hotel with her husband Kent, told me last week after I’d become the hotel’s first ever guest.

The project was conceived in an equally unlikely location – a river on the Kamchatka peninsula, in Russia’s far east, where Kent and some friends were on a fly-fishing trip three years ago. Kent, a former school guidance counsellor, runs expeditions to prime rivers in Scandinavia and Russia for equally obsessive fishermen.

In between catching salmon on one such trip, Kent and his companions – three of whom just happened to be architects – got chatting about The Tree Lover, a documentary by Jonas Selberg Augustsén that had recently been shot in Harads. A prop left behind by the film crew – a rustic timber tree house, had become a local curiosity. Guests at Britta’s Inn (a guesthouse nearby that is the Lindvall’s other business) often inquired about the possibility of spending a night there but the facilities were not up to scratch. But what if they were?

Daydreams by the campfire suddenly took flight. Three years on, the result is a collection of four finished modules and a treetop sauna, with two more scheduled for completion soon. Each unit sleeps between two and four and each is architecturally unique. The Mirrorcube is the most visually stunning. Its facades are a constantly changing reflection of forest and skies. The cube can disappear completely from view one minute and reappear the next as the sun moves out from behind the clouds.

Inside, it is comfortable in that streamlined Scandinavian fashion, filled with light (there are seven windows) and magically private. Four metres wide, four metres long and four metres tall, there is enough room for a double bed, a few armchairs, a kitchenette, a separate toilet and a roof terrace.

The Bird’s Nest cabin

The Bird’s Nest, perched in an adjacent fir copse, is also concealed in the forest canopy, but using a differenth technique. Circular and clad on the outside with branches foraged from the forest floor, it is designed as a cocoon by architect Bertil Harström. The sense of envelopment continues in the interior, with specially commissioned soft furnishings in dark shades of felt and only a few small porthole windows to let in the light. Access is another novelty – an electronic ladder operated by remote control that can be withdrawn completely once the guests are inside. From below, only the branches of the nest’s base are visible, the way in is concealed.

The Cabin, created by Mårten Cyrén and his brother Gustav, shares the Mirrorcube’s focus on the vista and was designed from the inside out. A comfortable double bed is set square in front of floor-to-ceiling windows, inside a rectangular capsule clad inside with smooth birch panelling and with softly rounded corners outside. This is a room made for stargazing or watching the sun set over Lule River.

The imperative to respect the natural environment and to minimise disruption both visually and physically is a guiding dynamic of the project. This means use of local, sustainable materials such as wood, as well as a highly innovative approach to the prosaic necessity of plumbing.

The tree houses use freezer toilets (which appear little different to a normal toilet but freeze waste for later removal) or “cinderellas”, which incinerate waste in an internal combustion chamber.

“The incinerators are perfectly safe and very efficient,” said Anette Selberg, the hotel’s marketing director. “One person using it every day for a year would only produce one single cup of ash residue.”

Despite an insistence on top-quality materials, as well as the need for innovation to overcome technical difficulties, the first six cabins are being done on a surprisingly low budget – SKr5m (£440,000). The plans for the following 18 rooms will require heavier investment. “It would help to have a partner to put some money into it, though it’s important that we retain control,” said Britta.

Her husband agreed: “It can be good if you have the right people to work with.” And as every conversation with Kent Lindvall and his architect friends inevitably turns to their consuming passion, he added: “If they liked fly-fishing too it would be great.”

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Details

Cabins at the Treehotel ( www.treehotel.se ) cost from SKr3,500 (£313), including breakfast. There are several scheduled daily flights from Stockholm to Luleå Airport, from where it is about an hour’s drive to the hotel; a taxi will cost SKr1,100 (£98) each way