Inside the house - A refined civil home

If we had visited the house during the period when young Thor was growing up, we would have entered a refined civic home with clear touches of cultural history from Trøndelag, according to his mother’s tastes. Alison was born into a wealthy family business home and when she moved into Steingata 7 with her ten-year-old daughter Ingerid, she decorated the house according to her own cultural background and artistic talents from Trøndelag. The sitting room, for example, contained a corner cupboard from Uv in Rennebu and a table and furniture from Oppdal. There were also rare examples of earthenware from the old pottery at Hospitalløkken in Trondheim. All the textiles in the three rooms on the first floor were woven by Alison herself and the woven piece over the full bookshelves depicted “Salome’s Dance”. Thor Heyerdahl’s first biographer and childhood friend Arnold Jacoby has described the house and pays special attention to the extension added by Heyerdahl Senior in 1900. This became the domain of the lady of the house and was a very pleasant addition: “If you went through the door to the left, you came to the rooms, three in a row and filled with old, stylish furniture and artwork. The Empire Style furniture in the dining room was made of birchwood, with intarsia in a darker wood. I remember it well, but without fondness, perhaps because it shocked me. The images on the ancient wallpaper in the living room could cause you to dream of wandering though groves and pavilions for secret meetings in dark summer houses”, remembers Jacoby and continues: “Once inside the innermost room, an annexe Thor’s father had built for his wife to have space for her activities, that is where I first felt real enjoyment. The extension looked like a tumour growing out of the side of the house from the outside, but it was beautiful inside; a hearth, beams, walls decorated with woven pieces and a cupboard with windows which was a masterpiece of rustic rococo… Thor Heyerdahl had his own room on the second floor with a window looking towards the Larvik Fjord. It was a large room painted white and sparse, with his mother’s bed in a dark corner behind a screen in the furthest corner of the room, a cupboard, a hearth and nothing else.” The home’s main living room on the first floor mirrored his mother’s tastes. It was decorated with spectacular manor house wallpaper portraying images of ancient ruins. They were so interested in the history of art that a national interior magazine paid a visit to Steingata 7 in the 1920’s in order to write about them: “The old-fashioned main living room is cheerful with its classic Empire Style furniture and manor house wallpaper. It is wallpaper that was once ordered for the palace in Oslo, but when it proved to be inadequate, was sold at auction and set up in a farm in Larvik’s Storgate”, writes the journalist Ingerid Skancke. The farm was most likely Postmaster Christian Ludvig Pind’s home. He took over the office from his father in 1792 and lived at Storgata 34 – the house in question being built there in 1801, and he died at 95 years of age in 1859. The farm was later fitted out as a hotel and it was after this that Heyerdahl Senior got his hands on the wallpaper at auction. “This wallpaper is especially fine and an attraction for Larvik”, said the architect Lars Jacob Hvinden Haug. He is an expert on the Manor House, the count’s residence in Larvik, where the wallpaper was kept for a long period of time. “Panorama wallpaper like this was first presented in Paris in 1806 and they are found in important farms in Norway such as in Lade in Trondheim, portraying images of the Battle of Austerlitz. The wallpaper is a typical example of the Empire Style, in which paying homage to the Roman period is a central element. Napoleon’s plan was to recreate the Roman Empire, hence the name “Empire Style”.