Recently I have completed a concept for a new house on the island of Bjorøyna in Øygarden kommune in the archipelago south of Bergen. This has been a fun place to design. The site itself is quite large, but it has somewhat awkward boundaries which partially lie along the walls of a neighbouring house. Most of the western part of the site is covered by a forest patch, and the bedrock is close to the surface everywhere. To the north is a large unbuilt forested area. The brief called for a relatively small house, around 180 m2. Immediately it became clear that the best strategy was to place a new house furthest to the northeast, where it can lie as close as possible to the existing access road in connection with the other buildings. In this way, we are able to save almost all of the existing trees and build primarily on terrain which already has been affected by previous activity. At the same time the house receives a fantastic connection with the coherent forest patch to the north. The c

Some drawings from my sketchbooks, May-June. Japanese roofs, a cool block on Ullernåsen, and cabins in the Pacific Northwest.

This small addition to a free-standing house on Nordstrand in Oslo kommune has recently received a building permit (Nor. rammesøknad)! The existing house is a so-called "våningshus" from Husbanken, originally built in 1951. It consists of two levels over terrain and a cellar. In 1993, the kitchen was expanded with a new addition on the south side. The current owner wishes to expand the house further on the east facade, with a larger garage on the ground level and two bedrooms on the first level. The new addition has a total size of approximately 67 m2, including an entrance room and a covered entrance terrace. I like to work with existing houses and gardens just as much as I like to design something completely new from the ground up. Designing an addition presents a unique type of problem to solve, where you have to take a conscious disposition toward an existing structure and its qualities while coming with a new intervention to the existing whole. Various approaches can be taken. I t

Recently I bought "Life-changing Homes": a new collection of some of the many stories documented by independent journalists/writers Kirsten Dirksen and Nicolás Boullosa, founders of the website faircompanies.com and also creators of perhaps the best channel on YouTube right now (https://www.youtube.com/@kirstendirksen). Kirsten and Nicolas travel around the world with their family in search of stories about simple living, natural building, small-scale agriculture, tiny homes, and any other alternatives to the generic modern corporate lifestyle that it is possible to imagine. The book is a type of short-form presentation of many of the people and their home places that they have met in their travels (and often created longer videos about on their channel). At any time in history, there have always been people to whom the mainstream way of doing things in a given society has never appealed. This book documents a whole variety of such people, from all across the world and in all possible

I have always been interested in building worlds, expressing personality and creating unique spatial experiences in architecture and design. For me the most important part of a project is the «big idea» which lies at the base of it all, the holistic concept that provides a place with its initial character and overall organisation. While technical and ecological functions, materials and details are of the utmost importance in determining the final quality of a designed environment, it is of little use to apply these aspects to a weak initial concept. Some of the most immersive worlds and environments that people have ever created appear in movies, graphic novels, illustrations and more recently in video games. In entertainment and storytelling, the design of characters, environments and all other visual aspects of a work is done at the beginning of the production process by so-called concept artists. This is not unlike the design process in professional architecture, where one tends to

Recently I got my hands on a book called «Contemporary wabi-sabi style» (Artpower International Publishing, 2025). Not the easiest book to find locally, but I managed to order it off of Amazon. This book is a collection of modern projects that are designed in the spirit of the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi sabi. Wabi (侘び) refers to utter simplicity, or the appreciation of a higher beauty amid apparent lack of beauty. Sabi (寂び) is the appreciation of the patina of use and age. Taken together, wabi sabi is the search for beauty in the imperfect. When you accept things as they are and do not try to improve them, there is more time left to just enjoy these things. Imperfection is not something to be endured. It is an integral part of life we must learn to accept and celebrate, and is perhaps life's truest expression. This is a philosophy that I have always personally been inspired by, and I try to incorporate it into my own projects. The pictures in this book are beautiful, and a usef