VENUSGARDEN was a real sleeping beauty, finally 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 old letters 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 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 in thirty minutes and Copenhagen in an hour – you are never far from anything in Scania.
In the summer 2005 the metamorphosis of VENUSGARDEN into a temple of love began. The renovation was supervised by my husband Åke Fridell with the assistance of an outstanding carpenter and a number of skilled brick layers used to the old building techniques. Only the roof and the frame work of the recidence 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 Marius from the anthroposophical community in Järna. They filled the house with their special colours of luminosity: walls of creamed terracotta in the living room and kitchen, coral rose in the Venus room and my study in all the colours of the rainbow. Everything so beautiful that it is a sheer joy to stay here! You can follow the transformation in the before, during and after pictures below on the following three pages.