Nore i Numedal · laftehus since 1791
Hewn in malmfuru, raised by hand — built to sink two centimetres a metre, and to stand three hundred years.
Nore i Numedal, 60° north.
We do not build cabins.
We raise houses.
Malmfuru is the Loftsgård family’s workshop at Nore, in the valley Norwegians call middelalderdalen — the medieval valley, where more log buildings stand from the Middle Ages than anywhere else in the country. The houses around us have been carrying their own weight for seven hundred years. They are the standard we work under.
Since 1791 the workshop has done one thing: laft — walls of whole logs, carried entirely by their corner joints. Eight generations have cut the same six-sided notch, the Nore-nov, with axes only. No saw touches the joint; a sawn face drinks water, an axe-burnished face turns it away.
Halvor I · Torstein II · Halvor III · Knut IV · Margit V · Olav VI · Torgeir VII · Embret VIII — Sigrid IX, apprenticed 2021
A tree is answered
seven winters ahead.
Malmfuru — ore-pine — is pine grown slowly enough that most of the trunk has turned to resin-dense heartwood. It is the timber of the stave churches, and it is not bought; it is found, standing, in the steep sides of this valley.
We blaze a chosen tree seven winters before we fell it. Barked at the blaze, the tree spends those years driving resin into its own wound — sealing itself for the work ahead. Felling happens in the two coldest weeks of January, when the sap stands still, and the logs dry seven more years under the open sheds at Nore before an axe touches them.
The tree and the workshop
are the same age.
The pine cross-cut in the workshop doorway was felled in January 2019 with two hundred and twenty-eight rings. It germinated in 1791 — the winter Halvor Loftsgård raised his first loft. Draw the scribe across the log; every stop is a recorded ring.
1791
The pith
The seed takes in a burnt clearing above Nore — the same winter Halvor Loftsgård raises the workshop’s first loft. Tree and workshop are the same age.
The pith
The seed takes in a burnt clearing above Nore — the same winter Halvor Loftsgård raises the workshop’s first loft. Tree and workshop are the same age.
Torstein II takes the axe
The second master. The tree is thirty-two rings around; a sapling still, standing in his felling rights.
Halvor III takes the axe
He re-roofs the church barn at Uvdal and cuts the six-sided nov the house still uses.
The first husbok
Knut IV numbers every log of a house shipped in pieces down the valley, and writes the first house book. Three hundred and eighty-four houses stand in it now.
A thin ring
A cold, sunless summer. The ring is a hair’s width — malmfuru is made of years like this one.
Margit V takes the axe
The fifth master, the first woman in the book. She holds the workshop through the hardest decades.
Five thin rings
The war years. The workshop raises nothing and repairs much; the tree keeps its own record of the cold.
Olav VI takes the axe
He plants the drying sheds’ shelter pines and blazes trees his grandchildren will fell.
Torgeir VII takes the axe
The seventh master. He begins the seventh-winter visits — the workshop returns to every house to ease its doors when the setning is done.
Embret VIII takes the axe
The eighth and current master. Sigrid, the ninth, apprentices in 2021.
The felling
Cut in the second week of January, in the still cold, at two hundred and twenty-eight rings. The cross-cut hangs in the workshop doorway; you pass under it on the way to the benches.
Six faces. No saw.
No nail in the wall.
A laft wall is carried entirely at its corners. Each log is scribed to the one below with the medrag — a groove drawn along its underside with a two-pointed scribe, then hollowed so the log rides its neighbour without a gap. Into the groove goes husmose, moss gathered in August and laid dry. No foam, no sealant, nothing the house cannot outlive.
The Nore-nov itself is cut blind: six faces inside the joint that no one will see again once the next log settles over them. Between four and seven thousand axe-hours go into a house, and most of them are spent here, at the corners, on faces that disappear.
Four houses, one yard.
A tun is the yard a farm’s buildings stand around. Ours holds what the workshop has in hand and what it will not forget: the open tinging, the promised, the raised.
the cornice the wind builds on a ridge
A one-room-deep mountain house of forty-one logs, drawn for a shoulder of ridge above the tree line. Its timber was felled in January 2021 and stands in the drying sheds now; the walls can rise in the summer after next. The tinging is open: where Skavlen stands, and which way its window faces, is still the owner’s to decide.
dead calm — smoke goes straight up
A lakeside house of fifty-six logs, promised to a family from Kongsberg. Its nov corners were closed this spring; the sod roof goes on before the first frost. It will spend its first seven winters settling toward the water, as every house of ours does, and we will come back to ease its doors.
under roof, autumn 2026
the blue hour, when snow holds the last light
Raised in eleven days in the summer of 2024 on a mountain shoulder above Dagali, from logs felled the January the owner first wrote to us. Sixty-two logs, each one’s felling winter recorded in its husbok. Its first setning winters are behind it; the doors were eased this spring, and the house is done sinking.
stands above Dagali since 2024
the silver bothy — sun-greyed, never painted
Knut IV’s last house, raised in 1932 and never painted: malmfuru left to the sun goes silver-grey and stops there. It stands a short walk from the workshop, in birches, and we keep it as our measure — when a tinging asks what our houses look like in a hundred years, we do not answer. We hand over the key and let Sølvbu do it.
stands at Nore since 1932
The house sinks.
We build for it.
Every log house settles. As the moss packs and the timber finds its weight, a new wall sinks about two centimetres for every metre of its height, across its first seven winters. We do not hide this. Doors, windows and chimney are built to ride the setning — sliding jambs, clearance over every frame — and in the seventh winter we come back, unasked, to ease the doors. Then the house is done sinking, and it stands.
Write to Nore.
A first letter needs no drawings. Tell us where the house would stand, what it is for, and who will grow old in it. The timber for one more house is drying now; the book for 2028 holds one open place.
