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. :-)

Who runs Old Stavanger?

When the city council of Stavanger voted to preserve a central part of town under the name of Old Stavanger, they also decided to form an organization that has as its sole goal to look after the interests of Old Stavanger.

This organization is named Foreningen Gamle Stavanger. The board of Foreningen Gamle Stavanger consists of members appointed by the city on merit and two residents of Old Stavanger elected by the inhabitants themselves. Foreningen Gamle Stavanger is invited to comment on all city council decisions involving Old Stavanger, and also handles applications for funding of renewal and restoration activities in Old Stavanger.

In addition, there is a neighborhood association for Old Stavanger - Velforeningen i Gamle Stavanger. This is run by and for the inhabitants, and arrange seasonal gatherings and parties, regular dugnads, and so on.

The buildings that make up Old Stavanger are preserved ("vernet") but not protected ("fredet"). This means that the owners may do whatever they like with the building provided that they keep the exterior intact. If one desires to make any changes, these changes should be for the better, i.e. they should bring the building towards a more "original" state. If a building for instance has modern large-pane windows one is allowed to replace them with identical windows, or one can apply the city for permission to replace them with new windows in the style of the windows that were fitted when the house was built.

Internally we are allowed to do whatever we please. This freedom has led to a much wider variety internally than externally - but even those who strive for an "old fashioned interior" has opted for a number of non-original modern conveniences, including electricity, running water and indoors plumbing.

Welcome to Old Stavanger

Hi there!

As an inhabitant of Old Stavanger, I'd like to welcome you to our neighborhood and to this blog.

The Old Stavanger blog is intended to be a place for me to jot down notes and thoughts concerning the place where I live and have spent a significant amount of my life. If you happen to find it amusing or helpful, so much the better.

If you have no idea what Old Stavanger is, here is a short introduction to get you up to speed:

Old Stavanger or "Gamle Stavanger" in Norwegian, is an area of the city of Stavanger in the county of Rogaland, Norway.

In the years after World War II, a new city plan was created for Stavanger. It included razing most of the old wooden buildings in the city center, and replacing it with new modern structures in concrete. One single voice spoke up against this plan, and today it is recognized that Gamle Stavanger owes its existence to Einar Hedén, then City Architect of Stavanger. In 1956 the city council voted to conserve part of the old city centre.

The area selected for conservation was the one considered the least desirable, consisting of small rundown wooden buildings located on the western side of Vågen, the bay that the center of Stavanger circles. This area has what is considered North Europe’s best kept wood houses, from both the 19th and 20th century. Some of the houses are owned by the municipality, but most are privately owned. Over the years the area has changed from seedy to trendy, and today is considered a choice location for the urban-minded with a sense of history.

So Old Stavanger is not a museum, it is a living community with a couple of hundred households. We who live here are proud of our homes and our neighborhood, and enjoy showing it off to visitors.

Einar Hedén passed away a few years ago, and the central square of Old Stavanger has been renamed from Stavangerplassen to Einar Hedéns Plass, in his memory.

(Parts of the above have been copied from/paraphrased from the Wikipedia entry for Old Stavanger, which is in part written by me.)

I'm going to take a few days now to plan how this blog is going to evolve and what I'm going to write about. If you have any wishes or suggestion, feel free to make a comment.