Icelandic Turf Houses: How Grass-Roofed Farms Kept Iceland Warm

Drive through the Icelandic countryside and you will eventually see them: low buildings that seem to grow out of the ground, with grass on the roofs and white wooden gables facing the yard. They look almost like part of the landscape, and in a sense they are.

Icelandic turf houses were the standard way to live on the island for close to a thousand years. They were built from what the land offered, and they kept families alive through long, dark winters. Here is how they worked, why they were abandoned, and where you can still step inside one.

A building made from the ground itself

Iceland had very little usable timber after the first centuries of settlement. The birch woods were cut back quickly, and driftwood or imported wood was precious.

What the island had in abundance was turf. Builders cut it from boggy ground in blocks and strips and stacked it into thick walls, often on a base of stones. The roof was laid over a timber frame and covered with more turf, which grass soon grew over.

The result was heavy, dense and surprisingly warm. Thick turf walls insulate well, and the grass roof sheds rain while holding heat inside.

Patterns in the walls

Look closely at an old turf wall and you will often see a herringbone pattern. This comes from wedge-shaped turf blocks, laid in alternating diagonal rows that lock together as they settle.

Long rolled strips were used for roofs and for binding courses, while flat sods could cover the outside. Different regions had their own habits, which is part of what makes the surviving buildings so varied.

Turf walls do not last forever. Depending on the climate and the care they receive, they need repair or rebuilding after some decades. Keeping these houses standing is a craft that is still practised by a small number of specialists today.

How a turf farm was laid out

A traditional farm was not one house but a cluster of small buildings joined together. In the older arrangement, rooms lay along a central passage, so people could move between them without going outside in winter.

The most important room was the baðstofa. It was where the household worked, ate and slept, often in rows of beds along the walls. In the long evenings people knitted, carded wool and listened to someone reading sagas aloud.

From the nineteenth century, many farms adopted a row of gabled fronts facing the yard, each one with a painted timber façade. This is the image most visitors remember, and you can see it clearly at Glaumbær in Skagafjörður.

The kitchen and the pantry

Two rooms tell you a great deal about daily life: the kitchen and the pantry. The kitchen had an open hearth, and smoke drifted up through the rafters. Meat hung there to smoke, which is the origin of hangikjöt, still eaten at Christmas.

The pantry held barrels of skyr, whey for preserving food, dried fish and stores for the winter. Very little was wasted, and much of what Icelanders now call traditional food was shaped by these rooms.

If the history makes you curious about the dishes themselves, Icelandmat collects traditional Icelandic recipes, from smoked lamb to skyr, written for cooking at home.

Why Icelanders left their turf houses

Turf houses were damp, dark and hard to keep clean. As concrete and imported timber became available in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, families moved into new houses as soon as they could afford to.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the old farms were empty or used for storage. Many collapsed. Glaumbær, one of the best known, was lived in until 1947.

What survives today is largely thanks to the National Museum of Iceland, which looks after a collection of historic buildings, and to local museums that maintain them. Iceland placed the turf house tradition on its tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage in 2011.

Where to see turf houses in Iceland

Glaumbær in Skagafjörður is the classic stop on the northern Ring Road. It has a row of gables, a museum, and interiors furnished as they were.

Laufás, near Akureyri in Eyjafjörður, is a large former parsonage with a fine set of wooden fronts. In the south, Keldur on the Rangárvellir plain is among the oldest surviving farms, with parts that may date back centuries.

Turf churches are also worth a detour. Víðimýrarkirkja, close to Varmahlíð, dates from 1834 and is one of the few still in use.

These houses work well as part of a longer route. Our guide to architecture stops on an Iceland road trip suggests how to fit them between towns and landmarks.

What turf houses teach modern architects

Turf houses are often admired today for reasons their builders never thought about. They used local, renewable material. They worked with the climate instead of against it. When they were no longer needed, they went back to the earth.

That does not make them a model to copy directly. But the ideas behind them echo in contemporary Nordic buildings that use earth, timber and green roofs. Compare them with the refined timber engineering of a Norwegian stave church like Borgund, or with the modernist calm of Aalto's Nordic House in Reykjavík, and you see how differently the North has answered the same harsh climate.

Visiting with respect

Most turf buildings are fragile. Follow the paths, avoid climbing on walls or roofs, and check opening times before you go, as many sites are open mainly in summer.

Inside, the rooms are small and the ceilings low. Take your time. Standing in a baðstofa on a grey afternoon is the closest you will get to understanding how Icelanders lived through a winter, long before electric light.

Cover photo: Jakub Hałun, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.