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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS