Yikes! A YELLOW house in Old Stavanger !?

Of the visitors to Old Stavanger that I talk with, most are curious about the color of our house. The reason is simple - it really stands out, being yellow and not white as the vast majority of houses in the neighborhood.

So why is there a yellow house in Old Stavanger? Why don't the owners of this particular house conform to the standard color scheme? Why this attempt to stand out?

Most who wonder are surprised when I tell them that our yellow house is one of the few remaining that still have their original color. The houses in old Old Stavanger simply weren't white!

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries paint was made from natural ingredients - mainly boiled linseed oil - and colored by natural pigments. Price for these pigments varied widely, with red being the cheapest and white the most expensive. Farmers thus tended to use red paint for their utility buildings - barns, sheds and so on - and reserve the expensive white paint for their own house. In southern Sweden it was common to paint the facade of your country house white and the remaining sides of the house red, also in order to save some money (and still appear stylish..)

In small villages along the southern coast of Norway, a high percentage of the male inhabitants were sailors on Norway's once proud merchant marine. The buildings in these villages tended to be white. My theory is that this happened because the sailors often was able to obtain "free" white paint from the ship as they went on leave - but this is only a theory.

The inhabitants of Old Stavanger, on the other hand, were only rarely sailors. Mostly they worked in the canning industry that was the major source of income in Stavanger. For instance, the original owner of the house I live in was a cooper. These weren't rich people, and they had no source of cheap white paint. So they painted their properties in whatever color was available and that they could afford.

If you look at old pictures from Old Stavanger this is quite obvious. Even if these are black and white photographs, anyone can see that the buildings definitively weren't white. They were green, ocher, blue, red and surely, in some cases, white. In comparison to what could be seen back then, the streets of today's Old Stavanger must be bland and rather down toned, almost monochrome.

I once talked to a pensioned carpenter who did work on our house back during WWII, and he told me that the house was ocher then, just as it is now. Through elderly relatives we've been told that it was the same color back in 1907 when my wife's great grandfather bought the house.

So what happened?

When the city voted to preserve Old Stavanger back in the '60ies, the old quarter was a bit of a slum. The inhabitants were "old folks, artists and drunks", and it was very much the seedy part of town. The buildings were to a large extent in a state of rundown disrepair and it was clear that the entire quarter had to be cleaned up and rehabilitated before it could become the historical pride and joy that the enthusiasts wanted it to be.

At the same time, most of Old Stavanger was privately owned by people without much money. To help these, the city voted to give out free paint to all owners. And for some reason somebody - I've never been able to figure out who - decided that the paint should be white, and that Old Stavanger would be more picturesque with all the houses the same color.

A very few of the property owners protested. My father in law, who owned our house at that time, met with the city architect (Einar Hedén) and obtained his permission to exchange the free white paint for ocher. So a few houses in Old Stavanger remain in their original colors, ours even "by permission".

Every couple of years I can be found in a ladder repainting our house - linseed oil based paint is great in many ways, but wears down quickly. Almost every time I get to explain the mystery of the yellow house in Old Stavanger to passersby. The fun bit is that over the past few years I've started to hear the same story told by the tour guides as they stop on the corner outside to start their tour of Old Stavanger.

If you ever happen to pass a yellow house in Old Stavanger and notice a guy on top of a ladder, feel free to say "hi!". But speak softly, I don't like heights and I startle easily. :-)