When one thinks of the Arctic Circle, it’s easy to picture some of the harshest weather conditions that exist on Earth. You might find yourself wondering why anyone would want to live in a region where temperatures can fall to negative 58°F, but about four million people live in the arctic circle (10 percent of which are indigenous people who have lived in the region for tens of thousands of years).
So, if you’re going to live there, you might as well do it right. Like the Hjertefølger family who moved to Norway’s mountainous island of Sandhornøya in 2013 and began utilizing sustainable living practices to help stave off some of the harsh weather conditions they knew they’d be facing.
Not only is their home built from a mix of organic materials, like sand, water and clay, but they’ve encased their three-story home within a 25-foot-tall solar geodesic dome that helps protect them from heavy snowfall and high winds. And as a bonus, it also retains quite a bit of heat.
The dome works so well that they can even successfully maintain a garden that provides a good portion of their food, including things like apples, cucumbers, tomatoes, grapes, apricots, squash and different melons. Which is pretty impressive when you consider that they go without sunlight for at least three months each year.
“We love the house; it has a soul of its own and it feels very personal. What surprises us is the fact that we built ourselves anew as we built the house,” Ingrid Hjertefølger told Inhabitat. “The process changed us, shaped us.”
The family lives comfortably in one of the least inhabited regions on the planet and get to regularly experience breathtaking views of their natural surroundings as well as the Northern Lights overhead.
“The feeling we get as we walk into this house is something different from walking into any other house,” Hjertefølger shares. “The atmosphere is unique. The house has a calmness; I can almost hear the stillness. It is hard to explain. But it would have been impossible getting this feeling from a house someone else has planned and built for us, or a house with corners and straight lines.”
Who else is ready to go off-grid and live comfortably in a remote part of the world?
All image credit: the Hjertefølger family