“Its like a real Bullerby here!”
The Dalslands studio is located in Dals Långed in Sweden, on a small island between the river and the canal, which bypasses the hydroelectric power station, which is also located on the island, via several locks.
The canal is directly adjacent to our garden; the path also leads to the bathing and boat landing stage on the river, which is only about 100 metres away.
The house is a two-storey wooden house from the 19th century and is heated by several fireplaces via two chimneys, which distribute the heat throughout the house.
There is also an electrically operated heating system for hot water and to meet today’s requirements for indoor temperatures.
The upper floor consists of a large communal room, a bathroom and four spacious double bedrooms.
The ground floor is divided into an almost self-contained three-bedroom flat with kitchen and bathroom and a three-bedroom flat with wide door openings to one area and a further bathroom.
The house has a large two-storey barn, the upper floor of which has been converted into a large function room – our studio.
There are a number of storage rooms in the basement. There is also a single-storey long building containing a one-room flat, a workshop and five small storage rooms, as well as a small wood-heated bathing pool filled with canal water.
The garden is framed on three sides by these three buildings and on the fourth by a row of trees and shrubs.
Dalslands Studio and its environment
We got to know Dalsland as a Swedish region in the summer of 2011 on our honeymoon and have been there ever since.
Hajo & Andreas
It lies north of Gothenburg between Lake Vänern and the border with Norway, is almost one and a half times the size of Saarland and is very sparsely populated with just under 50,000 inhabitants. It is a somewhat forgotten region in Sweden off the beaten track. The largest town by far is Åmål (known from the film “Fucking Åmål”) with just under 10,000 inhabitants, the next largest towns have significantly fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. Dalsland is famous for its many lakes and extensive forests and is easily accessible from mainland Europe.
Dals Långed is one of the larger towns in Dalsland with almost 1500 inhabitants. It lies on the Upperudsälven, which is also crossed by the Dalsland Canal, built in the 1860s. The village has a history that is not untypical for this region and was founded in the middle of the 19th century as a sawmill and mill. The house we bought there also dates from this period.
The subsequent paper industry no longer exists there, but a branch of the Gothenburg College of Arts and Crafts does. In one part of the village, Steneby, there is a centre for Dalsland tourism, Dalslands Aktiviteter. There you will find an elk park, a restaurant and café, a game meat trade, a high ropes course, the “jättegrytor”, hemispheres in the rock with a diameter of up to 7 metres carved out by ice-age waterfalls, and more.
In summer, tourist boats sail once a day in each direction in the Dalsland Canal between Bengstfors and Håverud, where there is a unique aqueduct, a canal built as a bridge over a waterfall.
At one point there is a boat bridge, a railway bridge and a car bridge on top of each other. The tour by boat and back by rail bus is a day event and passes right by our Dalslands studio.