Author: Sarah Laskow / Source: Atlas Obscura
On Læsø, a large Danish island in a bay of the North Sea, there are centuries-old houses that are unlike any others. Their roofs are made entirely of a thick cushion of seaweed, harvested from the water and layered to make long-lasting and uniquely charming structures, which look a little like giant, manmade mushrooms or like ‘80s rockers on a great hair day.
Once, Læsø had about 250 houses in this style; over the years, they disappeared, and their numbers dwindled down to a couple dozen or so. Today, some are preserved as parts of museums and tourist destinations, but they aren’t just relics from the past. Some of them still serve as homes, and one of these tangtag houses, originally built in the 1700s and called Andrines Hus—Andrine’s House—is up for sale, for around $400,000.
The backstory of the seaweed roofs isn’t quite as charming as the results. Læsø has an unusually high concentration of salt on its land and in its groundwater, and back in the medieval period, a salt industry hub developed here. Harvesting salt meant concentrating that brackish water down over huge fires, fueled by the island’s wood supply. Only, the fires needed to burn so hot and so long that eventually the industry had denuded the island of all its trees, making it all but unlivable and hurting the salt industry. Around the same time, in the 17th century, the Little Ice Age changed the salinity of the island’s groundwater, and soon the industry collapsed altogether.
In the years that followed, the people who still lived on the island made do with the resources they had.
The bay around them was abundant with eelgrass, Zostera marina, and they harvested it as a building material. Teams of builders (usually women) would form the seagrass into giant bundles with long…The post For Sale: A House With a Roof Made of Seaweed appeared first on FeedBox.