A mystical mood persists on Iceland’s Snaefellsnes peninsula. Local lore tells of elves and trolls, while many believe Snaefellsjökull, a dormant stratovolcano on the western tip now hooded by a glacier, to be one of the world’s seven earth chakras, or energy centres. Its otherworldly aura inspired Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which imagines Snaefellsjökull as a gateway to subterranean worlds. Even the most cynical of visitors report Vernian awe at the region’s sublime landscape.
A dramatic locale only adds to the eccentric history of Amtmannshúsið Arnarstapa. Built in 1774, it’s one of several historic houses in Arnarstapi, a small fishing village at the foot of Mount Stapafell, a cone-shaped palagonite volcano next to the glacier. It originally served as a merchant’s house, back when Arnarstapi was a strategic trading post under Danish rule, and later became the regional governor’s residence. In 1849, it was sold to a farmer, taken apart and reinstated in Vogur, a farmland some 115 kilometres along the coast near Borgarnes, where it remained in the same family for a century, before falling into disrepair in the 1960s. In 1983, under the guidance of the National Museum of Iceland, it was dismantled again, repaired and finally re-erected over the course of a decade in a picturesque spot on the grass fields of the Eyri estate at Arnarstapi, close to its original location. In 1990, having been designated a historical site, it passed into the hands of five local couples for use as a shared holiday house.
The current owners, Bernd-Michael and Petra Rumpf, purchased Amtmannshúsið in 2019 as a vacation retreat, having been struck by the area’s vitality while touring Iceland on a family trip the previous year. ‘When the house came up for sale, we couldn’t resist revisiting. We braced for the harsh Icelandic winter but were greeted instead by breathtaking scenery. It felt as though the house itself had chosen us,’ Petra relates over email. While the exterior had been admirably well reconstructed, the interiors were short on soul, with anachronistic details, including an Ikea kitchen. Still, the singular magic of the property, with its spectacular views, was hard to ignore.
The Rumpfs, who are based in Switzerland, were determined to restore the house’s personality in accordance with its listed-building status. They came across the work of Hálfdan Pedersen, an Icelandic film-maker turned interior designer, via a magazine. Pedersen had restored his own abandoned summer house in Flateyri, in the Westfjords of Iceland, over a ten-year period using only reclaimed and recycled materials – an unusual approach in Iceland, where antique and architectural salvage businesses are almost non-existent, the locals preferring to buy everything factory-fresh. Pedersen met the couple and their three young sons over coffee in Reykjavik in the summer of 2019 and was taken with how each family member was given a chance to contribute their opinion. After paying a visit to the dwelling, he agreed to begin work in 2020, once he had put the finishing touches to a hotel project in Portland, Oregon.
It took two years to get things straightened out. A modest, two-storey building clad in tar-coated pine, the house stands on a stone plinth surrounded on three sides by dry-stone walls overlooking a lagoon of small ponds – reinstated in the 1990s, having been drained in the 1950s – with the dazzling North Atlantic beyond. Aside from an adjoining bathhouse at the back, its outbuildings number a meatdrying store made of tuff, or lava rock, with a traditional turf roof; a boatshed; and a guest house added in the 1990s.
The biggest challenge was finding reclaimed materials to suit an 18th-century home. ‘Sourcing and scavenging any historic lumber locally was just a joke, really,’ says Pedersen, who was forced to scour Europe for era-appropriate supplies. Equally challenging was tracking down craftsmen willing to work without modern-day fittings: Pedersen engaged seven different carpenters in total. Then there was the puzzle of getting furniture into the house via narrow window and door frames. A bespoke sofa six months in the making was an early casualty. ‘It was a lot of manpower for every step,’ says Pedersen. ‘At times it was like walking through syrup.’
The house now sparkles with storybook charm. Downstairs, an original stove has been restored to bring characterful warmth to the living room, its walls filled with pictures of the local area from a Reykjavik bric-à-brac shop, the sofa scattered with cushions covered in old Icelandic textiles accumulated by Pedersen. Built-in banquettes in the dining room and the main bedroom make the most of compact spaces, and afford a window-gazer a view of the blowhole beyond, where water spurts 50 metres into the sky when the wind is blowing from the south. In the two further bedrooms, nooks for beds were constructed out of pine planks requisitioned from a girls’ school in the capital founded in 1874 (where, coincidentally, Pedersen’s mother was once a student) but recently torn down to make way for a Hilton hotel.
All the curtains were made of antique Icelandic and Swedish tablecloths hung from bespoke thin steel rods, adding to the timeworn feel. Most special of all, in tribute to the area’s diverse avian life, is a series of hand-painted birds that decorate internal panelling. The work of Kristín Magnúsdóttir, a friend of Pedersen’s who came from Italy to paint them, meadow pipits, white wagtails, redwings and snow buntings flutter above door frames.
The family is particularly fond of a Eurasian oystercatcher that returns each year to nest on the mossy roof of the drying shack. The Rumpfs visit every summer and over the new-year holidays with grandparents, cousins and friends in tow. Days are spent exploring the basalt cliffs and caves, swimming in the sea and, to round it all off, dunking in the outdoor shower overlooking the glacier. Then it’s back to the house for a family-style dinner, with home-baked bread fresh from the oven. Such rustic pleasures are even more of a treat now the family has scattered from their hometown of Basel, with one son at school in London, another studying architecture in Zurich and the third leading a tech start-up in Silicon Valley. As Petra says: ‘The house serves as a unifying force, a safe haven where we can cherish the rare moments we spend together.’
A version of this article appears in the March 2024 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
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