Note Design Studio Steps a Skåne Longhouse Down a Sloping Österlen Site and Lines It in Lye-Washed Pine

Villa Österlen is only the second completed building by Note Design Studio, the Stockholm practice better known for furniture, products and interiors. The first was a mountain home in Ottsjö. This one sits in a village in Österlen, the rural southeastern corner of Skåne, on a sloping plot among orchards and rolling hills with views toward Hanö Bay. It was completed in 2026 and is a private home built around one clear brief: room for large social gatherings.

The interesting part is not the silhouette, which deliberately borrows the skånelänga, the long, narrow farmhouse type of southern Skåne. It is the way a studio trained on objects has worked on proportion, surface and light instead of chasing a new exterior form. The house steps with the ground rather than sitting on a cut terrace. Its walls are plastered stone and its roof is zinc, both chosen to weather. Inside, a custom oil-pigment and lye finish on Swedish pine does most of the atmospheric work. We read it as a test of whether interior thinking can scale up into architecture without becoming decoration, and for the most part it passes.

A Longhouse That Follows the Ground

Seen across dry meadow grass, the house looks almost familiar: a long gabled volume with a grey roof and few openings. That familiarity is intended. The skånelänga reference is structural rather than ornamental, so you get the single-room depth and the long, low profile, but none of the half-timbering or thatch that a nostalgic version would reach for.

The real decision is on the slope. Instead of levelling the site, Note steps the volume down the grade, and those level changes let one building negotiate between neighbouring houses set at different angles. The rough stone edge and planted bank along the side elevation keep the base of the house grounded in the terrain rather than perched above it.

Plaster, Zinc and the Village Church

The material palette takes its cue from the nearby village church: textured render over stone walls and a corrugated Rheinzink roof. That reference matters more than a style quote would, because it ties the house to the most durable public building in the village instead of to a catalogue image of rural Sweden.

Both surfaces were picked to age visibly. Zinc dulls and patinates; render stains and softens. The details stay restrained. A clad chimney rises out of the roof, skylights sit flush in the corrugation, and a small zinc canopy on angled steel brackets marks the entrance over a timber door. There are no gestures here that will look dated once the materials have weathered.

Thresholds, Passages and Terraces

The outdoor spaces are modest and well judged. A timber deck with two low steps sits in the shade of a tree beside a large glazed opening. A narrow paved passage between rendered walls, with a plain gutter and young planting, reads like a farmyard lane more than a designed path.

From the dining table, a timber-framed sliding door opens onto a flagstone terrace, so the stone floor inside carries through to the outside. For a house built around gatherings, this is where the plan earns its keep: the party can spill out without anyone noticing a boundary.

The Gathering Room Under the Gable

The centre of the house is a double-height living, dining and kitchen space under a gabled ceiling of stained, slatted pine. This is the room the brief was written for, and it is generous without being cavernous. The slats give the volume a fine grain that keeps the scale domestic even as the roof lifts overhead.

Note designed the long dining table and the paper pendant lamp specifically for this house, and you can tell. The lamp sets a lower ceiling of light over the table, which pulls the room's focus down to where people actually sit. A window frames the sea beyond, and a red wall panel and dark stone floor anchor what could otherwise have become a pale, all-timber box.

Kitchen, Hearth and Corner Light

The kitchen pairs oak cabinetry with a dark stone counter; the sources cite Norwegian slate and Bohuslän granite in the house. A long timber pendant beam hangs beneath the pitched ceiling and reads more like a piece of furniture than a light fitting, which is exactly the studio's habit of mind.

Nearby, a rust-red chimney breast holds a corner fireplace beside low wooden steps that register the stepped section inside. Corner windows, softened by tall sheer curtains, frame the deck and garden trees at an angle rather than straight on. It is a small move, but it makes the room feel inhabited from its edges, not just its centre.

Stairs and Attic Rooms

A narrow stair with slim steel handrails rises toward the slatted ceiling, deliberately compressed after the openness of the main room. Upstairs, the attic rooms sit directly under the roof, with exposed rafters, plank lining and a flush door that disappears into the wall.

Angled skylights cut through the roof with pine-lined reveals, so the light is warmed by the timber before it reaches the room. The lye-and-pigment finish shows its worth here. The milky tone the studio developed shifts through the day, so these rooms feel different at morning and evening without any change in fittings.

Bedrooms Tuned by Curtains

The bedrooms are spare: low linen-covered beds, knotty pine doors and exposed ceiling beams. Nothing is built in that does not need to be. The pine is left with its knots visible, a choice that keeps the rooms closer to farmhouse than boutique hotel.

Textiles carry much of the climate control and mood. Tall sheer curtains, one of them in a patterned black weave, filter low sun and blur the views of trees outside. Square and corner windows frame single trees rather than panoramas, which suits rooms meant for rest. It is interior design logic used as architecture: the window is finished only once the curtain is chosen.

Bathrooms in Glazed Brown

The wet rooms shift register. Tall glossy brown tiles line the shower alcove, including a tiled bench, and a compact washroom with a small timber window onto foliage. The vanity pairs cream drawers with a stone top and a glazed tile splashback.

The brown glaze picks up the warmth of the pine and the red of the chimney breast, so the bathrooms feel like part of the same house rather than a separate specification. The palette is confident, and it will hold up better over time than a default white tile.

Plans and Drawings

The plans make the site strategy legible. On the ground floor, two angled wings meet at an open central space, which is how a single longhouse type bends to sit between neighbours set at different angles. A small separate outbuilding completes the cluster, a nod to the farmstead grouping of the skånelänga. The upper floor repeats the angled volumes, with a stair, a void over the gathering room and a detached square deck.

The section and details show the pitched roof, wall build-up and foundation, with enlarged details at the ridge and window head. It is worth studying how thin the roof edges stay. Much of the house's quiet profile depends on those details not getting bulky.

Why This Project Matters

Villa Österlen shows a design studio moving into architecture without trying to prove itself through form. Note takes a regional type, keeps its structure and proportions, and puts its effort into the parts it understands best: surfaces, light, furniture and the experience of being in a room. The custom pine finish, the purpose-made table and lamp, and the curtain-tuned windows are not add-ons. They are the design.

The broader lesson for anyone building in a historic rural landscape is about restraint with intent. Following the slope instead of flattening it, borrowing materials from the village church instead of from a mood board, and choosing finishes that will weather in public: these are modest moves that add up to a house that fits now and should fit better in twenty years. We would happily see more practices treat vernacular this way, as a working tool rather than a costume.

Villa Österlen by Note Design Studio, Österlen, Skåne, Sweden, completed 2026. Photography by Eric Lefvander.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.