Most of us can only dream of getting away from it all and going completely off-grid. But for founders of the sustainable restaurant and farm Stedsans, it became a reality...
Mette Helbæk and her husband Flemming run one of the most beautiful sustainable retreats in Scandinavia. Regenerative restaurant and farm Stedsans is set in an ancient forest, 50 km north of Halmstad in Sweden, with 16 simple cabins, a floating sauna on a lake, a boathouse and a semi-open communal dining room with long pine tables.
The whole experience is designed to help you connect with nature, with dinner as the main attraction, a five-course wine-matched menu where plates are piled high with edible flowers, weeds and vegetables gathered in the forest and farm, plus locally-sourced meat, fish and cheese.
We caught up with Mette to find out why she thinks we should all be living in harmony with nature as much as we can.
Flemming Hansen, one half of the duo behind Stedsans. Photo: Mike Karlsson Lundgren
How did Stedsans come about?
It was always our goal to create a lifestyle lab for the lifestyle of the future. People are now waking up to the fact that the world does not work. Whatever you see in the media, there’s so much to see that doesn’t look good. And people want a different life, but there’s nowhere to go. We want to show that it is possible to live in a way where we do no harm.
We’ve always been inspired by ancestral diets and by the question of ‘what does it actually mean to feel good?’ So six years ago, we went on a search to find a place where we could really work with this special way of eating that we think mankind needs to know about, and show how easy it is to live well, eat well and be well, if you just follow the rhythms of nature.
Stedsans' menu features locally-sourced and home-grown ingredients. Photo: Mike Karlsson Lundgren
Stedsans has been running for six years. How has it changed?
Back then we were sort of just another restaurant with a concept, but it’s developed more and more to be about the lifestyle. It has been more about bringing us and our four kids into nature than just being about being a restaurant serving people food. We want it to be our happy place. So we’ve been asking the question – what do we actually want? What do our kids want? What do we need to thrive here? This year, it’s become much more of a personal project.
Did you figure out what you need to thrive?
We need to have more time. I think that’s one of the very important things, so we made the concept simpler, so we only have to focus on the really important things, like growing food the right way. If we just look around, we can see how much nature has to offer. There is such an abundance of free food in a forest like ours. We need sunlight, we need vibrant, clean, alive food, and we need time to spend with the people we care about.
What impact does the forest setting have on your guests?
We put a lot of effort into curating the space to tell the trees to behave nicely, to work with people so they calm down when they enter the forest, and their heart rates go down. That’s what trees do anyway. We just hope that our trees do it a little extra! People seem to take a little extra care to breathe a little deeper.
You seem very in touch with nature. How do you experience it personally?
I consider myself a very modern person – I’m not brewing big batches of nettle soup or anything like that – but it’s growing on me that I can hear what trees say to me, and I can sit down and talk to a plant and it will answer me back. I feel that it’s important knowledge. I am very keen on getting more people to have that attention to nature that they can actually communicate with.
I have a tea production where I dry herbs for tea, because I feel it is an easy way to connect with plants to drink herbal tea from plants that you grow or forage yourself. I hope I will be able to facilitate plant medicine courses here in the future.
What have you got planned for the next year at Stedsans?
We have a ceremony space opening up this summer, and we have also started catering more for families. We want them to come and experience what it’s like to be in nature with children, so they can hopefully fall in love with nature and take better care of it too.
Cabin stay including dinner (Saturday-Sunday): 8,850 SEK for two people; three-night stays and camping also available.