A peaceful hideaway in the Swedish wilderness. The 55m2 black steel structure with all the necessities and nothing more offers a chance to go offline and connect with nature. Every piece of the shelter’s dark-toned interior is carefully selected to keep focus on what is important – nature. Vipp’s legacy in steel work was put to use in designing the Vipp shelter – a steel pod wrapped in the Vipp DNA from head to toe. The shelter is a livable design object dropped down in nature.

A part of the Vipp hotel, the Shelter is an invitation to experience Vipp’s philosophy of design in places out of the ordinary. The hotel is not like many others. Instead of having all our rooms in one place, they offer a curated selection of destinations for unique experiences. The hotel is still small with just two rooms, but more are in the making. Check in to the Vipp shelter and check out from everyday life; gaze at the lake, listen to the sounds of the forest and cook to the calming crackling of the fireplace.

A shelter in its original sense has connotations of basic living serving a merely functional purpose and attending to our primal need of having a roof over our head. The starting point of the Vipp shelter is going back to basics; back to nature with basic functions defining a dense, compact space yet wrapped in the Vipp DNA with a clear aesthetic coherence and use of solid materials. In this way, the shelter becomes a tool that facilitates a nature escape.

According to Morten Bo Jensen, the biggest difference between this getaway compared to anything else on the market is the fact that he is not an architect. The shelter is conceived more like a product than a piece of architecture that melds seamlessly with its surrounding.

We didn’t start with a piece of land on which we customized a house taking into consideration the natural surroundings. “There is plenty of amazing architecture out there, but we wanted to conceive something different; an escape in the form of an object designed down to last detail, where the only choice left to the customer, is where to put it”. Downscaling a house or a pavilion to a product has given birth to the Vipp shelter and what Vipp encourages us to do with this modern escape is to live within the frame of a product.

Vipp takes on an analog approach in creating an operational living space that works and therefore begins with function. “If you are cold you heat up the fireplace centrally positioned in the shelter for an equal distribution of heat; if you are warm you slide open the parallel windows to create natural air-condition. By locating the house in the deep deciduous woods, we are able to take advantage of the leaves as sun shading in the summer months. In the winter, when the trees lose their leaves, the building’s black exterior absorbs sunlight and with the fireplace, there is a reduction in fuel consumption”.

“The question lit the spark. The answer was the Vipp shelter. A nature retreat designed down to the very last detail. A place with nature omnipresent and the landscape purposely framed. A setting containing all the necessities and nothing more. A unique space to unload and recharge.”

Source: archdaily.com, and Vipp