Swedish Timber Houses: Log Construction, Panelling and Falu Red

Swedish timber houses were for a thousand years built of horizontal logs notched together at the corners. From the mid-19th century, timber-frame construction with panelling became common, and around 1900 houses acquired ornamental woodwork. The red colour is a slurry paint, boiled from water, flour, linseed oil and a red pigment from the residues at the Falun mine. It was cheap and protected the wood, and red at first imitated brick and finer houses. During the 19th century Falu red became the colour of the countryside, and today the red timber house with white corners is an image of Sweden.

Facts

The log house: logs that lock into one another

The basic form of the Swedish timber house is the log house. Logs are laid horizontally on top of one another and joined at the corners with notches. The gaps between the logs were caulked with moss. There are many kinds of corner joint, with or without projecting log ends, and they differ between provinces and periods. A log house could be taken apart, moved and put up again, and it was common for houses to be sold and transported to a new farm.

Before log building, people built with vertical posts and planks. This technique lives on in the stave churches, where the walls consist of upright planks, or staves, set in a sill beam. About twenty-eight remain in Norway, and Urnes Stave Church, from around 1130, is the oldest. In Sweden, Hedared Stave Church in Västergötland, from around 1500, is the only one to survive from the Middle Ages.

Log houses were long left unpainted. Pine left to stand in sun and rain turns silver-grey, and cottages, barns and outbuildings in the countryside were often allowed to age that way. Paint was an expense, and it went first to the houses that were meant to be seen.

Falu red: brick for those who could not afford it

Red was originally a colour of status. Brick and finer stone houses were red, and in the 17th century timber houses on manors and in towns began to be painted red to resemble them. The pigment came from the Falun mine in Dalarna, where copper ore was extracted. The residues from the mining contained iron-rich sludge which, after roasting, gave a red powder, an iron oxide. It was cheap and available in large quantities.

Falu red is a slurry paint. The pigment is boiled with water, flour and linseed oil into a thick paste that is brushed onto untreated wood. The paint penetrates the surface but forms no sealed film, so the wood can dry out after rain. Over time the paint chalks and turns matt, and it has to be repainted, but it does not flake like an opaque oil paint. It protected the walls against weather and fungus and was easy to repair on the farm.

In the 18th century the paint spread to parsonages and larger farms, and in the 19th century it became the colour of the countryside, as more and more people could afford to paint. Corners, window and door surrounds and bargeboards were often painted white, at first to imitate the rendered corners of stone houses. The mine and the mining district around Falun became a World Heritage Site in 2001. Red was not the only colour: yellow ochre and pale grey were used on finer houses, and Gustavian manor houses were painted in light shades so that the wood would look like plaster or stone.

Panelling, timber frames and ornamental woodwork

From the mid-19th century, building changed. Sawmills were driven by steam, and sawn timber became cheap. Instead of building in logs, people increasingly built a timber frame, a skeleton of upright studs, which was clad with panelling. At the same time older log houses were given panelling on the outside, to protect the structure and to look modern. If you see a house with panelling, it may well be a log house inside.

The panelling can be read. Vertical board-and-batten panelling, in which narrow battens cover the joints between wider boards, is the classic Swedish panelling in the countryside. Horizontal panelling became more common in the first decades of the 20th century. Around 1900 houses also acquired snickarglädje, or carpenter's joy: sawn and turned ornament on verandas, gables, bargeboards and window pediments, often ordered from a catalogue. The villas in the new garden suburbs around the big cities adopted Swiss chalet motifs, Old Norse dragon heads and the curves of Art Nouveau.

Portable and ready-made houses are also a Swedish tradition. Fredrik Blom, architect to the navy in the age of Karl Johan, developed demountable timber houses that could be shipped and put up again, long before prefabrication became a concept. In the 20th century standard houses and catalogue houses were manufactured in factories, and today's solid timber continues the same idea on a larger scale.

Farms, church towns and timber towns

Some settings show how far timber building reached. In Hälsingland, prosperous farmers in the 18th and 19th centuries built large farms with festive rooms painted by itinerant folk painters. Seven of the farms became a World Heritage Site in 2012. The paintings and furniture in the houses belong to the folk culture described in the guide to folk art in the design section.

In northern Sweden, parishioners built small cottages around the church, where they stayed overnight during services and festivals. Gammelstad Church Town outside Luleå, with hundreds of red cottages around a medieval stone church, is the largest and has been a World Heritage Site since 1996. In small towns such as Eksjö in Småland, large parts of the timber town have been preserved, with yards and lanes that show what a Swedish town looked like before stone houses took over.

Around 1900 the farmer's house became a model for architects and artists. Artur Hazelius opened Skansen in 1891 with farmsteads moved from all over the country, and the Nordic Museum collected the objects of folk culture. National Romanticism took up log walls, tarred roofs and red walls in villas and railway stations, and the red cottage with white corners became a Swedish symbol.

How to date a timber house

Start with the structure. If you can see corners with projecting log ends, it is a log house, and it may date from the 17th century as easily as from the 19th. Then look at the panelling: vertical board-and-batten is older and more rural, while horizontal panelling and carpenter's joy point to the years around 1900. The windows say a great deal: small panes in glazing-barred sashes are older than large, undivided panes of glass.

Colour says less than you might think, since red houses have been repainted for hundreds of years. But a matt, chalking surface suggests slurry paint, and a house in pale yellow or grey with white details may be one that was once meant to look like stone. The roof is the next clue: roof shapes are explained in the guide to roof shapes, and the whole method in the guide to which style a house is.

The basics of Swedish building tradition and of materials show the timber house's place in Swedish history, and the words timber house and slurry paint can be found in the glossary.

How to read a timber house

Exercise

Why were timber houses painted red with Falu red?