A yoga and wellness retreat designed for a working farm above Lake Krøderen in Buskerud, Norway. The brief asked for a rural retreat building that could sit alongside the farm's existing barns and cottages without competing with them, while giving guests a yoga room, a cafe, a spa and a small office suite in one low-energy building. The scheme was developed through feasibility and planning stages and was not taken further.
Client: Private
Location: Lake Krøderen, Buskerud, Norway
Local Authority: Buskerud
Plot Type: Rural, working farm
Project Type: Commercial / Hospitality
Internal Area (GIA): 320 sqm
The starting point was the traditional Norwegian farm cottage: a simple, robust form that belongs on the land. The design takes that type and adapts it for a very different use, keeping the modest footprint and gabled silhouette while opening the building up to the lake and mountains on the far side of the valley.
The form is split between ground and first floor, so the building reads as two stepped volumes rather than one block. This does two things. It keeps the scale close to the neighbouring farm buildings, and it frames views of Lake Krøderen from both inside the building and from the farm's courtyard. Heavy masonry walls at the base are designed to appear as if they grow out of the slope, anchoring the building to the site, with a lighter timber-clad upper level above.
The ground floor holds the two spaces guests use most: a yoga room orientated towards the lake, with generous glazing on the view side and solid walls behind for calm and privacy, and a cafe and lounge that opens onto the courtyard. Both rooms are planned around daylight and quiet, with the structure kept simple so the rooms can be used flexibly for classes, workshops and retreat programmes.
A partially sunken lower level contains the spa and massage rooms. Setting these rooms into the hillside gives them a lowered, more enclosed outlook across the water, which suits the quieter use, and it keeps them naturally cool and acoustically separate from the yoga and cafe spaces above.
The upper floor is a mezzanine office suite with its own private entrance, so the retreat operators can run the business from the building without walking through the guest areas.
Buskerud has long, cold winters, so the building fabric does most of the work. The design follows the same fabric-first principles we apply to our Passivhaus work in London: a compact form, high levels of insulation, careful airtightness detailing and glazing positioned to capture low winter sun from across the lake while limiting heat loss elsewhere. Placing the spa below ground uses the thermal stability of the earth, and the split form allows cross-ventilation through the yoga room and cafe in summer.
The material palette was proposed to match the farm: local timber cladding on the upper level, stone and masonry at the base, and a simple pitched roof in keeping with the surrounding buildings. The intention was a building that reads as a contemporary addition to the farmstead rather than a visitor to it.
Retreat and yoga studio projects in rural settings share a set of practical questions: how to reach the site and where guests park, how the building relates to existing agricultural buildings, how to handle drainage and services away from mains infrastructure, and how to make a building that works in both peak season and mid-winter. This project worked through each of those at planning stage, and the approach carries across to similar retreat, studio and hospitality briefs in the UK.
If you are planning a yoga retreat, wellness centre or rural hospitality building and want to talk through the site and the brief, we'd be glad to talk it through. Please do get in touch.