We didn't know the half of it

Glass walls and birch forest

Juvet Landscape Hotel sits above the Valldøla river in Valldal, Norway. Glass-walled cabins built into a mountainside, each one facing the gorge and the birch forest below. You might recognise it from Ex Machina. The architecture does what the best architecture does: it gets out of the way and lets the landscape do the talking. When Justyna and Jarrod told us this was where they were getting married, we knew the place. We didn’t know the half of it.

The ceremony was set against the valley. No church. No four walls. The river somewhere below, the mountains everywhere else. Guests had come from the States, from Poland, from corners of the world that have nothing in common except these two people. When you take a group like that and drop them in the Norwegian wilderness for a weekend, something happens that you can’t plan. People stop looking at their phones. They look at each other.

Night came slowly. It does that in Norway. The reception moved inside to the communal spaces, where floor-to-ceiling glass turned the forest into wallpaper. Candles were lit. Reflections doubled the room. At some point the tree line and the dance floor became the same thing, and nobody seemed to mind.