Four sensational Scandinavian escapes

Out of the box, in Norway

With places in southern Europe having peaked at more than 50C for a few days last summer – for the second year in a row – many travellers’ thoughts are turning to Europe’s northern reaches. (That it’s light all night in June and July only adds to the appeal.) An outfit in Norway creates experiences and itineraries that leverage that interest amid the country’s extraordinary nature, buzzing culinary scene and cultural attractions from the Viking-era to the ultra-contemporary. Up Norway was founded by Oslo-born Torunn Tronsvang; she worked for Aman in Bhutan and Anantara in remote northern Thailand, so has form in the space where considered luxury meets soft adventure.

Up Norway can pull together a Michelin-all-stars tour around Trøndelag and Trondheim (2022 European Region of Gastronomy, and home of this year’s Bocuse d’Or), or a forage-your-own-seaweed, open-fire private dinner on a deserted fjord. Likewise, museum and collection visits, walking and cycling itineraries, and intriguing “discover your roots” journeys that make us wish we had some Scandi DNA in our helix. There’s also a “feelgood” wellness journey, with stops for arctic dips and floating saunas in Copenhagen and Gothenburg as well as the charming Norwegian west-coast city of Bergen. Itineraries from £2,999 per person for a five-night trip, not including international flights, upnorway.com

Ravishing royal designs in Sweden

Blekinge is Sweden’s smallest county and one of its wilder ones, situated on the southernmost coast, covered in alternating forest and plain and dotted with villages and coastal rock baths. The Eriksberg Hotel & Nature Reserve stretches across 1,350 hectares of land here. A working farm since the 17th century, whose owners began rewilding it in the 1940s, it now offers a catalogue of stays and experiences. These range from glamping to wine-paired gourmet meals to “safari” drives to observe bison, wild boar, red and fallow deer and dozens of endemic bird species.

Last month, Eriksberg added to its accommodations with The Ark (Arken in Swedish), a 23-room contemporary accommodation half-suspended in the landscape. All the rooms are south-facing with floor-to-ceiling windows, and beds are placed at their centre; wake up, draw back the blinds, and you’ve a panorama over what Eriksberg calls its “savannah”. Within the hotel are three signature suites, each a unique and fantastical room-scape whose interiors invite the outside in. The designs were masterminded by the two principals at Stockholm-based boutique firm Bernadotte Kylberg – one of whom is Prince Carl Philip, Duke of Värmland. eriksberg.se, from SKr1,881 (about £138); The Ark, from SKr2,900 (about £213)

Gimme (Danish) Shelter

A Danish product design firm – in this case, one that’s best known for making… bins (but really sleek, pretty ones) – decides to apply its nous to a collection of accommodations. Actually a very Nordic leap, when you think about it, because at the root of good hospitality are many of the same qualities that define good Scandi design: space, simplicity, beautiful natural materials that make you happy to be around. Vipp opened its first guesthouse seven years ago, “a 55sq m steel pod by a Swedish lake”, as the company describes it; since then it has expanded with farmhouses in Denmark, a whitewashed villa in Puglia and a mountainside house in Andorra among others (coming this autumn: a rammed-earth property in Todos Santos, on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula). The shelters are vastly different from each other but share a common feature: you and your party are the only guests.

Cold Hawaii is the newest to the portfolio; it sits in solitude amid the grassy dunes of Thy, the largest national park in Denmark. This particular stretch of North Sea is the local surfers’ semi-secret wave (hence the name of the beach from which the guesthouse takes its name). With his renovation of one of very few fisherman’s cottages that still stand along the coastline, Danish architect Ebbe Lavsen (along with Caroline Hahn) has turned the 185sq m space into a three-bedroom, two-storey haven of bleached timber, glass and pale brick. The magazine-worthy central kitchen is, naturally, signed Vipp from top to bottom. The skies are vast, the views empty, and the sea a couple of hundred yards away. vipp.com, from €545

Rustic luxury over Lofoten

The summit of Mount Rønvik, in Bodø on Norway’s north coast, has long been a popular rest point for local walkers and tourists, with its views of the towering Lofoten Wall and, from September to April, the Northern Lights. In 1890, the Turisthytta – “tourist cabin” – was built here, all in wood; it was replaced in 1965 by a modernist interpretation of the same concept that eventually fell into disrepair and was demolished eight years ago.

Next month, Nordic Hotels & Resorts – the company behind Sommerro in Oslo and Villa Copenhagen in the Danish capital – will open Wood Hotel Bodø on the site of the old Turisthytta. Constructed, like the 1890 original, mostly of local timber, it has 177 rooms ranging from cosy studios to two-bedroom suites, a clutch of restaurants, and a spa-sauna and fitness area arrayed across its entire eighth floor, where the views are one of the primary attractions (as they also are from the rooftop pool). The mountain is laced with trails and the surrounding sea is eminently swimmable under the midnight sun. woodbodo.com, opening rates from NKr1490 (about £110)