Photography © Treehotel
Treehotel in Harads, northern Sweden, has spent sixteen years building in the treetops. Its ninth room, designed by Swedish architecture studio Nadén & Lind, stays on the ground.
Most of the treerooms at Treehotel are known for being up in the air, quite literally. Since Kent Lindvall and Britta Jonsson-Lindvall opened the hotel outside Harads in 2010, just south of the Arctic Circle, they have commissioned a series of treetop cabins from architects including Tham & Videgård, Bertil Harström and Snøhetta, and they have become some of the most photographed hotel rooms in Scandinavia, for good reason.
Swedish architects Per Nadén and Mattias Lind have placed the cabin on the forest floor, surrounded by two organically shaped walls that curve around the existing pine trunks, creating a sheltered glade beneath the treetops. The positions of the trees, the light and the natural variations in the terrain defined the architecture from the outset.
The walls are there to limit the view rather than open it up. As the Architects put it, "by limiting the field of vision, other senses are heightened." With less to look at straight ahead, your attention moves upward to the light filtered through the tree canopies, and to the sounds and smells of the forest around you. Where the other rooms tend to present the forest as a panoramic view, Oasis curates the view from a very different angle.
“By limiting the field of vision, other senses are heightened.”
On the inside of the curved walls, Oasis has its own private outdoor space, complete with a sauna and hot tub tucked among the pines. It's a place to spend time outside regardless of the season, whether beneath the long daylight hours of a northern Swedish summer or on a winter evening when the northern lights might appear, if you are lucky.
And while Treehotel's other treehouses have become destinations in their own right for their extraordinary architecture, Oasis offers another reason to make the journey to Harads: A reminder that sometimes the best way to experience the treetops is from below.