The Greenhouse Effect

Sitting upon the family farmstead, surrounded by trees and pasture, stands the extraordinary glasshouse where architect Margit Klev and her young family have made their home. Here, Klev has created a house within a house, placing her bespoke building inside a vast glass barn, delivered as a kit from Denmark and erected on site in just two weeks. This protective glass shell not only protects the family home inside it, but also shelters an indoor garden and garden rooms, where Klev can nurture the kind of plants and trees that would never usually survive a Norwegian winter.

‘Inside the greenhouse I can grow grapes, apricots, nectarines and peaches,’ says Klev, whose two greatest passions are architecture and gardening. ‘I can also grow a lot of herbs around the other plants: parsley, salvia, melissa – lots of herbs that don’t grow so well outside. And I can also use the greenhouse to grow small plants from seeds that I can plant out in the open later on, in the spring or early summer.’

Margit Klev grew up on the farm, situated in a rural area to the west of Drammen and Oslo, while her mother and father – a land surveyor – as well as her brother and sister all live close by. She initially studied ecology before switching her attention to architecture at Trondheim University, followed by a year in Stockholm. She worked with two practices in Oslo before co-founding her own practice, known as Outline, based in Drammen. The Greenhouse Home was one of her first independent projects and also one of the most personal, shared with her husband, physicist and hydrogen specialist Arnstein Norheim, and their two young children.

Having inherited a parcel of land on the farm, one of Klev and Norheim’s greatest wishes was to be able to enjoy the feeling of being outside and immersed in the natural world all year round, including the harsh Norwegian winters. The solution was the super sized greenhouse, manufactured by Drivadan in Denmark, and delivered to the site as a vast kit of parts, ready for assembly on a pre-prepared concrete pad. The resulting glass shed is thirty eight feet tall with around 4,000 square space in total, while an integrated ventilation system provides natural cooling via roof vents during the warmer months. This glass shell provided a secure and stable environment, beneath which Klev was able to create her own bespoke home, the indoor garden and a collection of garden rooms.

‘One really important thing was that I wanted to make sure every room in the house had a window that opened onto fresh air and not just into the greenhouse,’ says Klev. ‘So all the bedrooms and key spaces are located to the north, or to the east, which also helps keep those rooms cool in the summer. But then I also angled one side of the house holding the most important space, which is the kitchen and where we spend most of our time, so that it fully connects with the greenhouse spaces alongside. The kitchen is really the hub of the house.’

The layout evolved from these key decisions. This spacious kitchen also holds the dining area and a small lounge, all spilling out into the bright and enticing garden zones alongside. A library, his and her offices and two of the four bedrooms are also situated on the ground floor, while upstairs hosts the main sitting room plus the master suite and an additional bedroom. The flat roof of the house within a house also offered the opportunity to create another shared space – a rooftop terrace ideal for entertaining, but also used as additional sleeping zone in the spring and autumn.

‘It’s usually spring and autumn because it’s too cold in the winter and too warm as well as too sunny in the summer,’ says Klev. ‘Also we have no lights or streetlights on the farm, so it gets completely dark, so we can see the stars through the glass ceiling.’

Sustainability is a key concern, with the farmstead very close to functioning off grid with its own biomass plant, water source and, most recently, a micro hydro electricity station installed by Klev’s father, as well as solar arrays. There is also an element of self-sufficiency to the family’s way of living more generally, with Klev growing fruit and vegetables at home, while also sourcing other food and livestock as locally as possible, including their own sheep.

‘I spend most of my spare time growing vegetables and for me sustainability is part of a bigger picture,’ says Klev. ‘The biomass plant use woods from the forests around here, which my sister owns, which heats the houses and brings us hot water. My brother’s wife has horses, so we use the manure on the vegetable garden. It’s all connected. There are big changes in how we experience the house and the garden during the year, but the glasshouse does help to make it possible for us to carry on growing things and keep using these garden spaces all through the winter.’

margit@outline-ark.no