A conversation with Birta Jónsdóttir

Birta Jónsdóttir and her family commissioned Hverfi Cabin from us in early 2022. The house is a 94-square-meter single-story residence on the Reykjanes Peninsula, an hour southwest of Reykjavík, completed in late 2023. We visited her in March to talk about how it has held up.

On the brief

Eero: When you first came to us, you said you wanted "something that does not pretend to be anywhere else." What did you mean?

Birta: I meant I had seen too many houses on the peninsula that looked like they had been picked up from a magazine and dropped onto the lava. A Scandinavian modern house, a Californian beach house, an Alpine chalet — none of them belonged where they were. I wanted a house that knew where it was.

Eero: That is a clear brief. It is also a hard one.

Birta: I know. I am sorry.

On the wind

Eero: The site is one of the more exposed we have worked on. How does the house behave in weather?

Birta: It behaves better than I expected. The wind sounds different from inside the house — softer, more distant. I had assumed we would always hear it. We do not. That has been the biggest surprise.

Architecture cannot stop the weather. But it can change your relationship to it.

Eero: And in winter?

Birta: The stove is the center of everything. We light it in October and we keep it lit until April. Our daughter does her homework on the floor next to it. We eat dinner facing it. The house was designed around it, and we have lived into that design.

On time

Eero: What would you tell someone considering commissioning a house in a place like this?

Birta: Two things. First, give it more time than you think. We were impatient at the beginning, and we were wrong to be. Second, trust the architect more than the internet. We had endless ideas from blogs and Instagram that turned out to be wrong for the site. You found out things about the land that we did not know after twenty years of visiting it.

Eero: That is generous of you to say.

Birta: It is true. We have lived in the house for two and a half years. Every season teaches us something we did not know about it. That is the best thing I can say about a building.