The Icelandic turf house, a home that grows back

When Norse settlers arrived in Iceland in the ninth century they found birch scrub and very little timber worth building with, and a climate that would kill you for getting shelter wrong. So they built with what was everywhere. Turf.

An Icelandic turf house is a timber frame, usually driftwood or imported wood used sparingly, wrapped in thick walls of stacked sod cut from bogs in a herringbone pattern. The roof is turf too, laid over birch bark, and it stays alive. Grass grows on it. Sheep have been known to graze on it.

The thermal performance is remarkable. Walls a meter or more thick hold heat from a small fire and from the bodies inside all night. The traditional baðstofa, the communal living and sleeping room, sat above the animal byre in many farms so the warmth of the livestock rose through the floor. Families slept in rows on wooden platforms and worked wool there through winters that ran dark for months.

The trade was maintenance. Turf rots. A roof needed patching every few years and a full rebuild every few decades, which means no turf house standing today is materially old, even when the site is. The house at Keldur has fragments from the twelfth century. Skógar, Glaumbær and Laufás preserve the fuller form.

Iceland abandoned them fast in the twentieth century as concrete arrived, and the last families in turf farms moved out within living memory. The technique nearly died with them.

It is back now, taught deliberately as a craft and applied for its insulation as much as its heritage. Architects working on cold climate building keep rediscovering the same conclusion.

A house made of the field it stands in, needing a fire the size of a kettle to stay warm, was not primitive. It was tuned.