Eighteen Years. One Last Invitation.

There's a word I keep coming back to when I think about Villa Solsiden: stewardship.

Not ownership. Stewardship.

Because that's what this really has been — eighteen years of being the caretakers of something that was here long before us and will go on long after us. The land doesn't belong to us. We belonged to it, for a while. And what a while it has been.

We couldn't have created Villa Solsiden without the people who showed up. The friends who came for a weekend and stayed for a week. The family members who rolled up their sleeves when something needed fixing, planting, building, or celebrating. The ones who sat around the table on late summer evenings and helped us figure out who we were becoming. You know who you are. This place holds your energy too.

But this post would be hollow if I only told you about the easy guests.

Over the years, Villa Solsiden has opened its gates to people carrying very different kinds of weight. Troubled youth who had stopped trusting adults. People in recovery who had stopped trusting themselves. Refugees who had stopped trusting the world. They came here — some tentatively, some reluctantly — and something happened.

The animals didn't care about their history. The horses didn't read their files. The land asked nothing of them except presence.

And in that simplicity — the unhurried rhythm of nature, the radical honesty of animals, a place with no performance required — something in people would quietly, visibly shift. A teenager who hadn't spoken in weeks, suddenly talking to a horse. Someone who had been running for years, just... stopping. Sitting. Breathing.

I have been humbled more times than I can count standing in this place watching that happen. Humbled is the right word. Not proud — humbled. Because I didn't do it. Villa Solsiden did it. The animals did it. Nature did what nature has always done, when we finally get out of its way.

That is the energy here. That is what visitors feel the moment they arrive. It's real, and it's layered into every corner of this land.

__________________________________________________________________________________

I had just put the last full stop on Screw the Script when Solli Gård found us.

That's how it works sometimes. You finish one thing, and the universe — apparently not done with you yet — slides something extraordinary across the table and says: well? Are you brave enough?

Four hundred apple trees. Cider production. A greenhouse that seats sixty people. A completely unreasonable, magnificent next chapter.

We were brave enough.

Which means Villa Solsiden — eighteen years of labor of love, every season, every harvest, every repair, every healing, every dream talked through over a glass at the end of a long day — is going on the market this May.

The kids have grown up and flown. And with that came the restlessness that no one really warns you about. What else is out there to experience? What if we said yes to the thing that made no sensible sense at all?

So we did. Because the alternative is fading into the background in beige cardigans and sensible shoes, and letting other people have all the good stories.

Screw. That.

Before we hand over the keys, we want to do one last thing properly.

We're inviting you to come.

Come and stay with us at Villa Solsiden — a few days in the Hokus Pokus Hut — before this place begins its next chapter without us. Breathe the air. Feel the energy. Sit with the horses. Have a glass. Let the place do what it has always done.

This isn't just a property listing. It's a farewell celebration, done the only way we know how: with an open door.