Summary Thomas Johannessen Heftye, timber merchant and patron of vernacular architecture Thomas Johannessen Heftye was born in Oslo (or Christiania as it was then known) in 1822 into a wealthy family of bankers and timber merchants, at a time marked by Norway's struggle to assert its national identity after centuries of Danish rule. Heftye's greatgrandfather had come to Norway from Switzerland and the family continued to maintain close links with that country. After studying in England, Heftye returned to take over the family business at the age of twenty‐six and within a short time had become one of the country's most prosperous men. He was also a keen outdoor man and he devoted much time and energy in encouraging town dwellers to take part in active recreation in the countryside. He was one of the founders of Den Norske Turislfortning (The Norwegian Ramblers Association) in 1868 and was elected as its first president, a voluntary office which he held until his death in 1886. As a prosperous citizen he was more than conscious of his social duties. To stimulate an interest in Norway's natural and cultural heritage, he opened his vast forested estates to the public, where at the end of a long hike they could rest and purchase refreshments at a country house built in the National Romantic style and set in simple pastoral surroundings. When planning his two country homes in the eigthteen‐fifties and sixties on the outskirts of the city, he insisted that his two architects, Wilhelm von Hanno and Heinrich Ernst Schirmer, both originally German, should seek inspiration in traditional Norwegian architecture. He was thus a pioneer in the promotion of the National Romantic movement in architecture some thirty years before it took root as an accepted style in Norway. The house at Sarabråten, deep in the forests to the east of the city, was finished in 1856 and was based on the traditional farmhouse of the east Norwegian valley of Østerdalen, Norway's major timber district. Heftye had seen this type of house on his business trips there and had become enchanted by it. This early conscious effort in the use of Norwegian vernacular architecture, rather than simply copying it, was duly recorded by Norway's first ethnologist, Eilert Sundt, in 1861 in a series of articles on rural architecture. At Sarabråten Heftye had built himself a farmstead beside a lake in the heart of the forests east of Christiania. His other country house, Frognerseteren, was built in 1866–67 high in the hills to the west of the city with a wide view over the fjord. This time he turned to the local architecture of another region, Telemark, both for the main house and for the traditional store‐house erected close by. Sixteen years later, in 1884, he bought two old farmbuildings from other valleys and had them dismantled and moved to Frognerseteren. However, he was not the first to re‐erect rural buildings in an urban setting: King Oscar II in 1881 had moved an old house with all its furnishings from Telemark to the grounds of the royal residence at Bygd⊘y, south‐west of the city. In both cases the outcome was the same, for while Heftye intended the buildings at Frognerseteren to be an attraction for healthy walkers, at the same time being an object of surprise in the untamed natural beauty of his »great park«, the same effect was achieved by the sight which met the promenaders in the artificial landscape at Bygd⊘y. Rustic features in royal parks were a well‐known phenomenon elsewhere in Europe, but were usually specially built, imaginatively paraphrasing vernacular architecture, whereas at Bygd⊘y and Frognerseteren the fashion was given a new dimension by re‐erecting old authentic rural buildings.
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Sep 18, 2015
Erling Berge + 1
Open Access
