Norway’s Little Red Houses
Pop goes the Rorbu
The little red house is everywhere in Norway. Maroon, rust, or occasionally cherry red, these dwellings pop up in the most remote and unexpected places: mountain cabins, forest huts, seaside cottages, and fishing lodges on pristine lakes. I got curious as to why this color is so popular, especially in the hinterlands. To my utter shock, the Internet provided conflicting theories:
- A red house once meant you were from Scandinavia’s upper classes, because they built their houses with red bricks. So, red paint made a wooden home look prosperous, even if the owners weren’t. For this reason, red became popular, and then became simply a tradition that people followed.
- Poor people painted their houses red, because red paint was the cheapest to make (using ochre/iron oxide/fish oil/animal blood/copper mine byproducts— depending on the online source).
- Since white paint was more expensive, people used it for their homes, while red was used for barns and outbuildings.
- These days white houses are more popular in Norway, so some people choose red to make their homes stand out more.
I’m still not sure which of these theories are correct. But one thing is certain, red houses tend to “pop” against a Norwegian landscape, even when they are just a tiny speck of rust in a vast green wilderness. Looking through our photographs over the past two months, Teresa and I realized we could probably do a whole calendar featuring Norwegian little red houses. With that in mind, we have put together our top twelve from our travels the length and breadth of Norway:
The last photo is from the Lofoten Islands, where we have just arrived after two months on the road. Teresa and I chose this windswept, rugged string of islands off the northwest coast as a place to settle down for a few weeks and get our bearings. All along the coast we found fishing villages replete with little red houses on the water’s edge.
These are the traditional huts where Lofoten fishermen stayed during the fishing season. Locally, these are known as rorbus — literally “row houses,” from back in the days when fishermen rowed their boats to the cod fishing grounds off the Lofoten coast. The huts’ red color came originally from using cod-liver oil for pigment in the paint.
Starting in the 1960s, residents started renting vacant rorbus to tourists. Sixty years later, many rorbus have been repurposed and refurbished as guest houses, and many more have been built in the rorbu style specifically as vacation condos on this exceedingly popular, if blustery, archipelago.
When we arrived at our air B&B, we discovered it was a rorbu too. We have a little red house of our very own! The deck juts out over the frothing sea, and the wind blows so fiercely at times that the deck furniture has been lashed in place with nylon straps. There’s a fireplace upstairs and floor to ceiling windows, so we can watch the storms rage outside while staying warm inside. Teresa tells me she may never leave.
