A real-life hobbit village will soon be nestled in the lush forests of a Swedish island, a whimsical housing scheme billed as the first of its kind — but behind the fantasy gimmick lies a genuine interest for sustainable development.
The hobbits, small characters with hairy feet in novelist JRR Tolkien’s fantasy classics, are a model of environmentally friendly living, British hobbit-house architect Simon Dale said.
“Hobbits portray people living a peaceful life in harmony with nature,” Dale, 35, said during a recent visit to Stockholm.
Photo: AFP
He was in town to plan for the cluster of 30 houses on Muskoe, an island about 40km from the city center amid Stockholm’s picturesque archipelago.
The island’s first hobbit house is scheduled to be ready in the middle of next year, with the village completed within a few years.
At first sight, the huts resemble Bilbo Baggins’ dwellings in Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” Tolkien’s tale begins. “It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.”
In Tolkien’s idyllic agrarian setting, the hobbits live in tune with nature — in stark contrast to the author’s era of mature industrialization.
The Swedish hobbit village will keep the notion of natural materials and soft, round shapes: the windows, doors and walls will all be curved.
Yet the houses will be slightly more up-to-date, built for city-dwellers longing to retreat to nature on weekends and holidays.
An induction hob, beside a wood-burning range, will be the “most high-tech thing integrated,” said Dale, whose design promises airy ceilings up to 3.5m high.
Energy efficiency will be a primary goal, so heating will come from solar power and wood-burning.
Natural building materials from the area will also be used, such as timber, stone, sand, clay and grass.
Dale himself has lived in a hobbit house for the past decade with his wife and two kids.
The family now resides in the West Wales community of Lammas, the first British low-impact eco-village of its kind. Building the earth houses has become a passion, said Dale, who was originally a photographer.
The village is not targeted at fans of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — rather, it is intended to appeal to those who care about the environment and want to live close to nature.
“It’s a transition in lifestyle and values,” said Dale, who bears a faint resemblance to Bilbo as played by Martin Freeman in the new Hobbit film trilogy.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS