Going to the Swedish woods to live an Instagram fairy tale
The story of Stedsans in the Woods, as told on Instagram, reads like a modern-day fairy tale: a rural retreat deep in the forest of southern Sweden where the sun is always setting over a lake, campfire gatherings glow nightly, and every meal is a nourishing Nordic feast of food foraged and farm-raised. The wholesome appeal of this remote utopia among pines and old-growth oaks beckons through even the smallest of digital screens. But is social media enough to convince anyone to drive hours for a night in the woods?
Apparently so.
Before opening in summer 2017, Stedsans in the Woods was a pie-in-the-sky project dreamed up by Mette Helbak and Flemming Hansen. In 2016, the Danish couple closed their Copenhagen restaurant, Stedsans OsterGRO, and uprooted their family from the Danish capital to plant new roots in Sweden. The destination: 17 wooded acres next to Lake Halla, about three hours north of Copenhagen. The nearest town of even modest size is more than 25 miles away.
“Stedsans has always been a communication project,” said Helbak, a cook, stylist and cookbook author, who explained that the name, in Danish, means “a sense of location, a sense of where you are,” conveying the importance of place in the couple’s philosophy.
To fund this dreamy forest retreat, a Kickstarter campaign raised more than 1 million Swedish kronor (or around $107,000). Before long, hundreds of supporters were offering to volunteer.
“When it was craziest, we actually had people from every single continent except for Antarctica working here at the same time,” Hansen said.
Today the property has evolved into a rambling nature retreat with Bedouin tents and minimalist wooden cabins, with a restaurant powered solely by fire and supplied mainly by what’s found in the woods and grown in the gardens.
“In the forest, it’s amazing to see how you have food around without having to do anything at all,” Helbak said.
The staff is a multinational coterie of volunteers, interns and young idealists who farm, forage, cook, serve and construct most of the resort each season, and the atmosphere hovers somewhere between summer camp and commune. What’s lacking at Stedsans – namely electricity and running water – is considered part of the appeal. This is a place to disconnect from the larger world and reconnect with nature.
On two separate occasions last summer, I journeyed from my apartment in Stockholm to Stedsans in the Woods, driving hours to the forest retreat. On my second visit, a Saturday in late June, my husband steered our rental car down a long, gravel road lined with birch trees. It was the beginning of a heat wave that would scorch Sweden all summer, but the surrounding fields and forests were still mostly green.
The reception at Stedsans was a paper-strewn table inside a cavernous old barn where a young staffer with bare feet and a clipboard handed out cabin assignments, as at summer camp. She directed us to the Lake Trail.
The trail was an immediate immersion into the forest, winding through dense underbrush and across wooden planks – a perilous obstacle course for any guest who overpacks. After about 10 minutes we caught sight of the lake. A sign in loopy script pointed the way to the cabins, sauna, outdoor showers and restaurant.
Our cabin was a simple, fir-wood hut with a steep sloping roof, sheepskins on the floor, a comfortable bed piled with blankets, and floor-to-ceiling windows facing the forest. There were candles, basic side tables, two organic cotton towels and little else in the snug space. But what more does one need?
As daylight began to fade, dinner was served in the forest restaurant, a large glass-walled tent that seated 30-odd guests around three tables. The six-course meal was determined by what grows on the property, which operates on the farming philosophy known as permaculture. “It’s growing vegetables together with nature, and taking care of nature somehow while you’re doing it,” explained Henno Matzen, a Danish gardener and cook.
The dinner included grilled spring onions and fried nettles, soft-boiled eggs from the chicken coop, pike perch baked in embers, greens and new potatoes pulled from the garden just hours earlier. Pairings of natural, biodynamic wines from Europe accompanied the increasingly convivial meal.
The final two courses — cheese from the nearby dairy and a dessert of rhubarb, cream and elderflower blossoms — were served outside around a campfire ringed with rough-hewed benches and wood-stump stools. Many of the Danes had become fast friends, laughing together in the twilight, balancing dessert plates on their knees and eagerly raising their glasses for refills of sweet orange wine.
The following morning, the forest was serene with only the sound of twittering birds and rustling leaves. There was a slight chill in the air as we walked to breakfast at the barn where we’d checked in the afternoon before. Inside, a buffet was arranged on a long wooden table. Over a small campfire outside, a worker fried eggs on cast-iron skillets.
While we waited, I scrolled through photos I’d taken the previous day. I found one I eventually shared on Instagram. The following week, friends kept asking about that gorgeous place with the floating sauna in the lake.
Every time, I said it was Stedsans in the Woods, and it was magical. I always forgot to mention the bugs.