When Roja Brimalm and Johan Holmstedt set out to build a home for their family on the windswept plains of rural Sweden, they weren’t builders or architects — Johan is a mechanic and Roja a chef — but they had a vision: to create a self-sustaining bubble of life that could thrive even in the bitter cold of a Scandinavian winter.
source.image: Kirsten Dirksen
What they built is a modern-day naturhus, a home inside a greenhouse, inspired by Swedish architect Bengt Warne’s 1970s vision of biodynamic living. Their 400-square-meter glass structure now protects a timber home, gardens, and a complex water recycling system — all built mostly by the couple themselves.
source.image: Kirsten Dirksen
On the outside, it’s surrounded by open farmland. On the inside, it feels like spring. Even on a blustery March morning, bumblebees buzz through fruit trees, and Roja tends to her winter peaches, persimmons, and garden beds. The greenhouse keeps the temperature stable year-round, allowing them to grow most of their own fruit and vegetables, even during freezing weather.
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To cut costs, Johan assembled the entire greenhouse with rented equipment- a crane and skylift- and suction for the glass, and with help from Roja and friends, they built the rest — from the passive-solar core house clad in local fir, to the semi-underground summer bedrooms that stay cool in heat and warm in snow.
The side garden doesn’t just feed them — it also filters all the water from the kitchen and bathroom and returns it, clean, back to the pond. It’s a full-circle system: rainwater becomes greywater and blackwater, becomes irrigation, becomes food. Roja, who had never lived in the countryside before, says she now loves this little bubble in the middle of nowhere — a place where she can observe the seasons from inside her own climate. Today, we visit their home — the Rosenlund Naturhus — to see how a chef and a mechanic turned a dream into a thriving ecosystem.
