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Beautiful Tiny Turf House in Iceland – Full Tour & Interview

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A ninth-generation farmhouse in South Iceland shows how families once built entire homes out of grass and stone.

Deep in the Flói region of South Iceland sits Austur-Meðalholt, a farmstead where turf and lava stone still do the job insulation once did across the whole country. The video “Beautiful Tiny Turf House in Iceland – Full Tour & Interview” from Exploring Alternatives walks through the site with Hannes Lárusson, the artist, farmer, and turf-builder who grew up on the farm and now runs it as a private museum called Íslenski bærinn. Unlike most of Iceland’s surviving turf structures, which fall under the National Museum of Iceland, this one is kept alive on Lárusson’s own terms.

• The current farmstead dates to 1895 and survived a major regional earthquake the following year, in 1896.
• Austur-Meðalholt was lived in continuously until 1965, then sat abandoned for two decades before Lárusson and his family began restoring it in 1985.
• The complex clusters separate structures — living quarters, kitchen, barn, and stables — that share thick walls of wetland turf and lava stone, linked by interior hallways so residents never had to step outside in a storm.

A Farmhouse Built to Outlast the Weather, and an Earthquake

Turf construction in South Iceland wasn’t decorative — it was the only insulation available against wind and cold that could shut a farm down for days. Builders packed thick walls from local wetland turf and lava stone, supplementing them with timber gables where wood, always scarce and often imported or scavenged as driftwood, could be spared. That combination is why a house built in 1895 could take a serious regional earthquake in 1896 and keep standing, and why Austur-Meðalholt families kept living in it for another seventy years, until 1965.

Hannes Lárusson’s Return to His Childhood Farm

Lárusson lived on the turf farm until he was nine years old, which makes his restoration project personal rather than academic. After Austur-Meðalholt sat empty for two decades, he and his family started rebuilding it in 1985, disassembling and restoring pieces like the baðstofa — the timber-panelled room where an entire household once slept, worked, ate, and gave birth in the same communal space. Reviving the old building methods meant relearning how turf blocks were cut, stacked, and layered, skills that had largely died out once postwar Iceland moved toward modern housing.

The house that survived an 1896 earthquake is the same one a nine-year-old boy grew up in and later rebuilt with his own family.

Mechanism of the Cluster System

Traditional Icelandic turf farms weren’t single buildings — they were clusters. Only one structure held the beds; the others handled food processing, livestock, or storage, and every one of them shared walls with its neighbor to trap heat more efficiently. Interior hallways connected the buildings so a farmer could move from stable to kitchen to baðstofa without opening a door to the wind. It’s a design logic closer to what you’d see in an underground home than a conventional farmhouse — burying comfort into the structure itself rather than fighting the climate room by room.

A Working Argument for Building Small and Natural

Alongside the restored buildings, Íslenski bærinn runs an exhibition on turf house heritage that doubles as a pitch: this is a genuinely sustainable building method, not a museum curiosity. That framing puts the site in the same conversation as other back-to-basics builds — the kind of thinking behind projects like a radically simple permaculture life on a quarter acre — where local materials and small footprints do more work than size or imported technology ever could.

Lárusson still keeps the farm going as both a residence and a working museum, which means the baðstofa Hannes rebuilt with his wife and mother in the 1980s is the same room visitors walk through on the tour today — turf walls, timber panelling, and all.