Our red-painted barn lies in Sunnanhed, a village with more cows than people, most of them belonging to Blomberg. What sets it apart from other red-painted barns is the house-shaped, iron-framed window that takes up a whole side—at night, the light inside makes the building glow like a lantern. In the morning, I turn an industrial metal wheel and the window slowly rotates to a horizontal position—it feels like a ritual to start the day with. If I were Pippi Longstocking, I’d ride the window as it seesawed up, somersaulting out to land in the field below with a laugh.
“I just wanted a spectacular moment,” cofounder Mike Lind tells me. “I sketched the window on a piece of paper and a local welder made it. It weighs more than two tons but it’s wonderfully simple—even my six-year-old can turn it easily.” Lind has the laid-back outlook and sartorial taste of a surf-rock bassist. He was born in Gothenburg to a Swedish father and Hawaiian mother, who met in the 1960s having been pen pals for years. After founding a fashion brand then dissolving it when he realised just how unsustainable the industry was, he became a keynote speaker on the subject and now invests in mental health start-ups, with a growing interest in the way psychedelics are being used for wellness. “In a funny way, Hello Sunnanhed is a bricolage of everything I’ve done, from design and sustainability to creating a space in which to slow down and reflect,” he says.
Lind bought the barn on a whim while driving around the countryside. “Everyone uses barns for storage, but to my outsider’s eye it seemed to have potential. It’s been standing here for 150 years and I wondered how I could propel it forward. I didn’t have any preconceived images as to what a reconditioned barn should look like—it was a blank page.”
From the outside, antique tools stacked against one wall, it looks as if a scarecrow might stroll out at any minute. Open the door, though, and you enter a rustic loft apartment: a vaulted 26-foot-high space wrapped in bare pine and polished concrete. Reclaimed timber was used to make the long central table and bench. Steps lead to a bed set on an open mezzanine in the eaves; underneath are two simple bedrooms. The bathroom is inside a wooden hut where a horse once lived (if she was there now, she could drink from the copper tub by the window). On the other side is, well, a large windowless space to use in any way you like: a yoga class, perhaps, or sound-therapy session.
