Electric Brutalism—Nesflaten, Norway

Gunhild Moe and Olav Lindseth run Energihotellet, a hotel built inside a 1962 hydropower mess hall in Nesflaten, Norway—Gunhild with a background in art, Olav in economics, both devoted to Suldal and the architecture that shaped it. When they expanded the hotel in 2015, they didn’t hire an architect. They hired Tai Victoria Grung, daughter of Geir Grung, the man who designed the original building.

The Work

Geir Grung built the mess hall in 1962 for the engineers constructing a hydropower plant that still sends Suldalsvatnet’s water twelve hundred meters downhill to a coastal aluminum smelter—a system that now produces eight percent of Norway’s annual electricity. He designed the whole settlement: housing, garages, workshops, and the plant’s circular control room, known locally as the UFO. Nesflaten is considered one of the best-preserved examples of Norwegian functionalism in the country. Sven Ivar Dysthe’s 1963 chairs are still in the original room. Nobody has replaced them.

Tai Victoria Grung’s 2015 wing sits behind her father’s building. In 2022 she added the hotel’s sauna. Two generations of the same family, sixty years apart, working the same piece of land.

Why It Matters

The hotel’s dinner is trout from Suldalsvatnet and vegetables from its own kitchen garden. The communal pool is heated with the same hydropower the valley was built to generate—guests swim, essentially, inside the reason Nesflaten exists. Nothing here was designed to be curated or photographed. It is simply what happens when a place is allowed to keep arguing with itself, generation after generation, instead of being restarted from scratch.

Support This Work

Energihotellet is located in Nesflaten, along Norway’s Ryfylke Scenic Route.

→ Visit Energihotellet

Read the full story → Electric Brutalism in the Wild — A Norwegian hydropower mess hall converted to a hotel, and the daughter who finished her father’s work.