VENUSGÅRDEN was a real sleeping beauty coming awake in 2004 when we took it over from the old couple living on the French Riviera who had been using it as a summer house for thirty years. In the old letters that we found in the attic it was then called the "House of Peace" (Fridens bo), a very fitting name for this old rural four-winged farm from the beginning of the past century lying quite secluded surrounded by high trees and rolling fields in the very south of Scania in Sweden. Only two wheel tracks lead from the gravelled road up to the farm.  And yet it takes only 15 minutes by car to Malmö Airport in Sturup or to the beautiful sandy shores of the Baltic Sea. You can reach Malmö, the biggest city in Scania, in thirty minutes and Copenhagen in an hour - you are never far from anything in Scania!

Click on the pictures below if you want to enlarge them!

In the summer of 2005 the metamorphosis of VENUSGÅRDEN into a temple of love took
its beginning. The renovations was supervised by my husband Åke Fridell with the assistance of an outstanding carpenter and a number of skilled brick layers used to working with old building techniques. Only the roof and the frame work of the residence remained when I came down in July that year so my husband wouldn´t let me see the devastation but thanks God I only had our proud vision in mind!

Now with the first building phase over and done the farm lies there as sweet as honey pie in pink and white in the middle of an ocean of corn fields. And I got exactly what I wanted: a ceiling like a chapel, floors of well-oiled beech and the best painters in the whole of Sweden, Bengt and Maurius from the anthropological centre in Järna. They filled the house with their special colours of luminosity, walls of creamed terracotta in the livingroom and kitchen,  coral rose in the Venus room and my office in all the colours of the rainbow. Everything so beautiful that it is a sheer joy to live here!  

You can follow the transformation of the livingroom below.
 

The old cobbled inner courtyard was completely destroyed because we had to put new drainage around all the buildings. But out of the muddy grounds a true garden of Eden emerged!

Now we and our guests walk around in our own floral paradise enjoying the most delicious scents and all shades of colours from thousands of flowers and trees in bloom.

The inner courtyard is Ylva´s special darling, romantically planned and planted and lovingly cared for. In it even her friends have been planted as the flower they see as a symbol of themselves!