Advertise your product or brand here contact www.OpenSubtitles.org today
In Sweden, when you talk about homein a more general way,
we say "hem."
But your own home is "hemma."
It's your special home.
We call this place Naturhus
because I built my houseinside a greenhouse.
So I have Mediterranean climate in Sweden.
It's like having Italy around the house.
Sometimes when you build a house, you push nature away.
You protect yourself from the nature.
But this is like morewe invite the nature to the house.
A nature house is all built around
trying to enhance the interactionbetween people and plants.
A home is not only like a shelter...
it can also be a place to feed you,
both with food and energy.
I have always wantedto build a house for my family.
It was a dream.
But when I started out, I didn'tunderstand that a home can heal you.
Should I go and get some herbs?
Look what I've got!
This for you.
And this for me.
We've lived in this housefor more than ten years now.
My children...
they haven't really experienceda life without it.
Breakfast is the most important meal.
-According to whom?-Me!
And Mom.
Our family is very close.
And I think I have itfrom when I was growing up.
I wanted to havea very strong family connection.
Me and Rosemary, we have three children.
Johannes, he's 14 years old, soon be 15.
And we have Natalie and Jonatan.
They are twins, 18 years old, soon be 19.
Jonatan is our special child.
He has autism.
Being a twin with Jonatan is likea really, really strong, special bond.
So I feel a huge responsibility, and I'm very protective about him.
I always say that he is my better half.
Jonatan is highly sensitive.
He feels a lot more than normal people.
And we have an environmentthat is very different from other houses.
Being close to natureand living in this little bubble
helped us a lot to grow as people.
Something happenswhen you come into a nature house.
There's a special silence inside.
You feel calm, relaxed.
The architecture drives the awarenessof the environment as a whole.
Just being very closeto that sort of cycle of life...
that's very beneficial for the mind, for the soul.
Me and Rosemary have beendreaming together for a long time.
When I met Anders, we lived in the same apartment.
He was a footballer.
Well, he was 19and was very fit and very charming.
Rosemary, she had a fresh way of thinking,
and she just fueled my inner thoughts.
Anders is an engineer, and he thinks like an engineer.
He has very big visions,
and I have more family goals.
I'm quite technical,
and she is morelike a person with feelings.
We are really a complement to each other.
We always say,
"As long as we just have the same goal, we are very strong together."
Before we had the children, we had a dream of building our house.
But for seven years, we were just putting away salary.
We bought the land in 1996,
and then we started to applyfor a building permit on a new house.
It was not meant to bea house in a greenhouse,
just an ordinary log cabin.
We wanted to have an old style, made in the old way of doing it.
It's like walking intoa house from the 18th century.
I really love the old styleof Swedish log houses.
They are built of materialsthat can be found around you.
So I wanted to know how to make a housedirectly from the forest.
I'm not an architect. I'm not a building engineer.
But for me, it's really to learn something new.
I'm very interested in that.
And if somebody else can do it, I think I could do it--
maybe not as good, but quite as good.
It took me many yearsto build the log house
because I made it by hand.
Mostly myself and my father.
I grew up helping my father to fix houses.
He was an excellent craftsmanwith an artistic eye.
He could really put his love into details.
When we make the corners, the logsshould be fitting quite precisely.
The hard thing is to put it togetherin a nice way.
You drill holes through the logs,
connecting the new logwith the other ones with a dowel.
There's no nails at all.
Nature House is a family project.
And my father, he's been my best friendduring the whole building period.
Always worrying. He's seen more obstacles than me.
Anders!
Anders, that's enough now. You've finished the work.
Okay, I'm coming!
Anders is very determined as a person.
Nothing stops him.
He's one of those people that getsso caught up in the things he wants to do
that he forgets to eat, he forgets to sleep.
He gets so caught up in, like, his work.
It was stressful.
It was a long process.
But sometimes you have to be stupid enoughto start this kind of project.
And then you have to be persistent, brave enough to finish them.
I got my brother-in-law, Rupert, to help me bring logs from the forest
to build the log house.
In the middle of the building process, we had the twins.
Trying to workand be a father of two children
and build a very complicated, time-consuming house,
it's the tough part.
He had a full-time job at a hospital,
and then he workedwhenever he had time over.
There wasn't much sleeping.
Then I had the night shiftwith the babies.
Jonatan, he was, like, scared to fall asleep when he was small.
So I slept with Jonatan, calming him every night.
We fall asleep like 4:00 in the morning,
and then I went to work.
I remember it wasvery dangerous driving home.
I was so tired.
I was really afraid... driving.
This was very difficult for us
'cause we didn't have any diagnosisfor Jonatan.
We didn't know really how to meet himor treat him or what to do.
It was very, very frustratingfor both of us.
I realized I won't finish the house, so I stopped building.
Before children, you have a goal and you just go there.
Then there comes children,
and then everything is lost, like a stormy sea.
You have to changethe way of reaching the goal.
And the goal was quite clear.
We needed the house for the children.
After a year, I wanted to start again.
But it was raining and windy,
and it was really hard to find timeto build in these harsh conditions.
I was looking for tents and a coverto put over the building place.
One day, I was reading a book
describing a house inside a greenhousein Stockholm.
The book is called På akacians villkor,"To Live Together With Nature."
And the idea came from Bengt Warne.
In the mid-'70s, there was this guy, Bengt Warne,
who basically just built this greenhouseon top of a regular building,
and thus created a very nice climate.
And that was really an eye-opener.
The way to extend the season
in order to enjoya more Mediterranean climate
felt very radical.
When I saw a house inside a greenhouse, I was excited and curious.
I showed it to Rosemary, and she said,
"I've been in a house like that, and it was lovely."
When I was 15, 16, I lived in Iceland,
and I went into somethingthat looked similar.
It was a greenhouse.
I just remembered the feeling, and I said, "It can be very, very good."
So we just adopted the idea.
Now there was weather protection.
It's not difficult. It's not very expensive.
You have to plan a little bit more, andyou will have a lot more benefits back.
I can tell there's a car coming.
I'll hold you then and wait.
We have this lake called Vänern...
third biggest lake in Europe.
Freshwater, quite cold.
We swim in there almost every dayduring the summer season.
The lake is very good for Jonatan.
Let's take our shoes off.
For Jonatan, it's very healthyto go down our little path to the lake.
He loves to go into the water
'cause you can feelwhere your body is connected to nature.
And this time together with Jonatanis so important for Anders.
Jonatan had his diagnosis of autism
before his birthdaywhen he was just turning four years old.
The Nature House wasn't finished then,
and I worried about how am I goingto find his space,
how am I going to make him happy.
We started with all these questions,
and everything went upside-down in a way.
Anders, he had so high expectations of Jonatan,
and the disappointment of him not beingthe son he was wanting him to be
was very hard for him.
When you have a child,
you can see yourself playing football, reading books, discuss this and that,
going on an adventure together...
And then when your childis acting very differently,
you understandall these dreams were just... dreams
with no option to fulfill them.
Now I really want to get out.
-Go back?-Yeah.
Should we swim back?
No, stop it.
I was looking for so much funin the future, together with my son.
To remake your dreams,
that can be very, very, very hard.
So, yeah, I was... completely devastated
for a long time then.
I'm leaving now.
Okay, I'll be right there.
We lived, in a way, day-to-day.
And when we faced difficulties, Anders went up to the house.
And I was fine about it.
"You're building our house. I'll take care of Jonatan."
In a way, I think it made Anders focus
on how he couldbuild a future for the family.
Jonatan was seven yearswhen we moved into the Nature House.
And it meant so much morethan I could imagine.
But it took some years before he couldfind his place into this house.
When we planned the house,
we wanted to have a big living roomwhere we could be together.
And we wanted to have smaller bedrooms
so the children can havetheir own little space.
But Jonatan didn't acceptthis little room.
At the time, I didn't realize how space and environment
was so importantfor people that has autism.
So he just chose a TV room,
and it turned out to be his roomafter that.
And then we needed to have something
that was isolating the soundsfrom the kitchen to his room.
Jonatan's door, my grandfather, he made it.
And we all sort of designed it.
But he made it very, like, detailed.
The little floweris like a symbol for our family.
It's a real thick door made of solid wood.
Jonatan's very proud of it.
It's very practical for our family,
'cause he can close it when he needsto be on his own and have his space.
Rosemary had asked me to make this houseto have these plants.
"What can we do with them?"
"We could probably get healthier.
We could probably adjust the waywe are living and eating."
Yeah... could have that one.
Perfect.
In the Nature Houseis the climate envelope, or climate shell.
The space in betweenthe log house and the greenhouse
is not as cold as outside.
Because of that, the growing season is like double.
That's the most important thing. Longer summer.
Along with the log house, I'm building the vegetable garden.
We started to have bigger discussions.
We have a greenhouse, we have plants,
we have water and we have waste.
Why not connect the sewage systemto the plant system?
Okay,
so let's go inside and check.
-Thanks.-Let's check out the new system.
Exciting! Okay, okay.
So system two is rebuilt...
We're in the very heart of Anders's house.
The eco-house wastewater system.
Or I should say "the sustainable wastewater system."
My work with Anders startedwhen I made an assessment of his house.
In the beginning, I was interestedin the actual efficiency of the system.
Let's jump up and take a sample.
-This is B cup.-Go for it.
We have an eco-cycle systemin Nature House.
Great.
We take the wastewater from the toilets...
and treat it in the basement.
The water that's been cleaned,
we pump it up to water all the plantsin the greenhouse.
Now that the wastewater is treated, it's not really a waste.
It's actually a perfect sourceof all the nutrients
that we need to have a fertilizerfor a sustainable agricultural system.
In my brain, it's just like nutrition for the plants.
I eat what's from the plants.
I don't eat the plant's nutrition.
I eat the actual tomatoes.
Then we pump the water outto plant bed one.
And then it runs back here.
We did this one-year screeningof the house,
and it turned out it was actuallya really efficient system.
Every week I take samplesand tests of the water.
I try to imitate nature's processes.
I don't thinkl would want it any other way.
I'm not victimized by my dadand his visions for this house.
To me it was just a questionof becoming more aware
on what chemicals I put in the system.
I like makeup.
I like products. I use shampoo, I use conditioner.
And I don't want to eat the chemicalsthat are in those things.
So for me it was like starting to findalternatives that are organic,
that are more safe to use in the system.
You can build a house with a greenhouse,
but it's not a nature house
if it's not the whole conceptwith the recycling system.
We have our wastewater, and it contains everything that we need
to have a sustainable and long-termsustainable agricultural system.
But in Sweden, there is a monopolyon treating wastewater.
The city wants to connect all houses
to the municipality's systemof sewage treatment.
There's no need at all to connect my house
because I have a freestanding system.
I don't need the city's system, because my system is better.
My system is renewing resources.
Their system is not.
Sweden is not more regulatedthan any other country,
but we have this thingthat everybody has to be very equal.
So you have to payan equal share of everything.
We have this feeling that nobody shouldhave anything more than the other one has.
Venture too far away from the mainstream, then you'll get cut down.
It's frustrating.
The city, they keep on sendingforms and papers.
It's extremely time-consuming.
Hello?
I want to hand some papers to theLand and Environment Court.
When you go to the city and say, "I have something new,"
and they don't have that in the form,
they say, "It doesn't exist."
Yeah. It has not existed because it's new.
"Yeah, but we don't have it in the form."
"It's not approved."
I guess it's the first ones that needto be stamped? The attachments?
Yes.
It doesn't matter what proof, how it works,
if it's beautiful, if it's good,
if it feeds you,
because they want you to pay.
That makes me angry.
They think of me as a problem.
They should think of me as a resource.
-Thank you.-Thanks.
People that come from other countriesare amazed at what we are doing.
And here, it's like we don't fit in, really, in the system here.
If they make everybody payfor a system that's not good,
that will stop peoplefrom being interested in nature houses.
You're not allowed to be different.
In Sweden, we have a long tradition
of building housesto survive in this tough climate.
Hey, kids, how many pizzas do you want?
I'll take a vegan pizza.
Natalie's plastic cheese.
It's good cheese.
No, it isn't.
We have two chimneysgoing right through the house.
They're very unique.
The fireplaces, they're always working,
so we don't need electricityto heat up the house.
They give a feeling of coming to a housethat is old but still is very comfortable.
My favorite place in the houseduring the winter is the roof.
It's good for Johannes to go upstairsand work out,
because it's kind of warm insidebecause we light the fireplace.
And especially along the roof, because the heat rises up.
Are you coming?
Yes, I'm coming.
Every Saturday, Jonatan and I bake this cake.
Shall we read what to do first?
This cake is really just a placeto meet and do something together.
Oops.
Not again!
When Jonatan got his diagnosis, I tried to read everything about autism...
psychology.
I tried to understand the human mind
and understand everything.
But it didn't help me.
Anders sees things, and he wants to solve them as a problem.
Just like an engineer.
But Jonatan is not a problem we can solve.
I was really looking for answers.
There was a momentbetween Anders and Jonatan.
I wasn't there when it happened.
Anders had been quite angry with Jonatan,
wanting him to do thingsthat he couldn't live up to.
Jonatan communicated to him,
"I've done so much for you...
so many times.
Can't you feel my love?"
Their souls met on that day.
Finally not seeing him as a problem, but as a close friend.
That changed. The... that meeting.
Anders accepted him for what he was.
And I think that is somethingwe all had to do with our expectations.
'Cause it's our expectationsthat makes us disappointed.
So that was their breakthrough.
What a lovely day.
Lovely day, yes.
Meeting him with total respectand no expectations,
just with love,
it really helped me.
Jonatan's autism made me think deeperin why I'm doing this house.
He taught methe meaning of responsibility,
which I'm now usingto take better care of the planet.
We are sitting in Upgranna Naturhus.
It's a meeting place.
A sustainable meeting placewhere people can come for a coffee.
We have a restaurant and café.
Anders has been a key person, of course, in this project.
I looked at Anders's websiteand fell in love.
So I knew this is the housel'm gonna build.
More and more people are thinking aboutthe nature house concept.
It's extremely importantbecause there is a need.
I want to affect the whole area.
I'll start by buying a plot of land
and building another nature house.
I also want to build an eco-village,
so you can have small-scale businesses, a pre-school, a health facility.
I have some interesting plans.
My house is just the first version.
We're making this concept more accessible.
If there were more nature houses,
the government would learnto see the benefits,
and we could have a greaterpositive impact on the whole system.
If you're not findingthe current system good enough,
then you have to take a little riskto achieve something better.
A system like Anders has builtin his eco-house
could potentially be implementedin all our cities.
I know Anders, and he has tons of energy.
So I'm optimistic.
Be careful.
Anders is following history,
and he's also helping other peopleto create their dreams.
So I think it's a littlenature house movement he's started.
The facade will run all the way outand cover here.
Ah, okay.
It's always very importantto have trailblazers,
and I think Anders is oneby living the story that he communicates.
He walks the talk, basically.
And that is brilliant.
Go, go, go!
We had a birthday partyfor Jonatan and Natalie.
They were turning 19.
Yes, they have lived!
Yes, may they live for a hundred years!
Indeed they will live
untiltheir hundredth year!
A four-fold cheer for the twins.
Live long.
Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
I'll read.
You'll read?
Congratulations...
Jonatan... for...
19th
birthday.
Jonatan, he has been having lessonswith a teacher coming here,
and we can see progress of his reading.
From...
the whole... family.
Anders was very touched when he saw that.
'Cause it's a goal for him, in a way, that Jonatan should read.
Omelette!
Very nice.
Are you enjoying yourself, Jonatan?
Yes, I'm feeling good.
Are you happy?
Yeah, I'm happy.
I realize more and more for every yearhow healing this house is for Jonatan.
The house is perfect for peoplewith high sensitivity.
Jonatan gets so much energyfrom the space outdoors.
He has so much empathy.
He has so much social interaction, even though it's against his diagnosis.
Do you remember thenames of the planets?
Yeah, I remember.
-One is Mars.-Yeah.
Another is Jupiter.
Yeah. Jupiter.
Look how beautiful.
Look there, look there!
Living here, I notice a great change for our family.
The longer you live in the house, the better the house gets.
It starts connecting with you.
Anders has put all his loveinto this house.
You can feel it in the logs.
It was like building a dream.
I'm very proud of himand what he made for us as a family.
We just want to show the worldthat there is an alternative way to live.
And it is a good one.
-Ja. Skål!-Skål.
I don't know if I can change the world, but I know I can change my world.
That's the most important thingfor my family and my children.
Our house is giving us hope,
and that hope is really, really strong.
Advertise your product or brand here contact www.OpenSubtitles.org today