Lindarbakki

When Elísabet Sveinsdóttir and her husband, Skúli Ingvarsson, bought Lindarbakki in 1979, the deed of sale was refreshingly honest. The little cottage was old, built from turf, stone, wood and concrete, and, as the document put it, “in many ways not very modern.” Not exactly aspirational real estate copy.

Lindarbakki had already outlasted most of its neighbors. When trading began taking root in Bakkagerði around the turn of the 20th century, small turf houses lined the seafront. They weren’t considered particularly desirable homes, and as newer building methods arrived, most disappeared. Lindarbakki, whose oldest section dates to 1899, remained. Its last year-round residents were Jóhanna Jóhannesdóttir and her son, Jóhannes Kristinsson, who lived here from 1967 to 1973.

Stella and Skúli set about restoring it, even adding a small turf-covered shed in the same style to hold old tools and artifacts. After Skúli died in 1987, Stella continued caring for Lindarbakki with help from friends and locals. For decades, she returned each summer, swapping her winter home in Kópavogur for roughly 30 square meters of turf-roofed history in Bakkagerði.

In 2019, Stella gave Lindarbakki to the municipality, and she spent her final summer there in 2020, by then in her nineties. The house is being preserved much as she left it, right down to one particularly Icelandic piece of upkeep: the grass needs mowing, roof included.