Rope, Ladder and a Garden Wall Yet to Come: Förstberg Ling's 150 m² Swedish House

A 150-square-metre house on Sweden's southeast coast gets its name from how you climb into bed: by rope or by ladder. Stockholm firm Förstberg Ling completed House with Rope and Ladder in 2025, in a small village where site regulations dictated much of the exterior form.

Lead architects Björn Förstberg and Mikael Ling describe the project as one built in two parts. The first is a traditional rendered masonry volume with a gable roof, shaped to satisfy what the architects call "the rather strict regulations of the site." The second is an enclosed circular garden, attached tangentially to the middle of the house. Markus Linderoth photographed the finished building.

Why a rope and a ladder?

The brief was typical of seasonal living: generous social spaces, smaller bedrooms. The two lofts supply the overflow sleeping quarters, and the means of reaching them — a rope and a ladder — are deliberately exposed. In the architects' words, the rope and ladder make "the vertical movement deliberately visible and physical." No hidden staircase softens the climb.

Inside, the rooms run in a line. They form an enfilade of similarly sized spaces arranged along the length of the volume, so from any room you can see the next. The bathroom breaks the rhythm, set at a forty-five-degree angle. Changes in ceiling height and framed views through large pivot windows tell the otherwise interchangeable rooms apart.

That linear layout turns circulation into architecture. The architects note that "changes in height, material, and orientation create small variations within an otherwise continuous sequence," so walking the house becomes part of living in it.

What is the house made of?

The structure is mortar block, rendered on the outside. Inside, the walls carry only a thin plaster layer — the blocks remain "clearly legible," a decision that keeps the construction method visible rather than papered over. Wooden planks cover the floors and ceilings, which the architects say add warmth and "a softer surface for hands and feet," a practical detail in a house where climbing features in daily routine.

The interior dividing walls mix masonry and wood in slightly varying proportions. These are thicker, oversized walls, and they absorb the house's storage and technical functions — structure doing double duty as furniture and infrastructure.

What about the garden?

The circular enclosure gives the house a calm, private outdoor room while letting the surrounding landscape stay wild and green. Its round geometry plays against the linear house; the two forms touch tangentially at the center of the plan. The site slopes gently toward the coast, and the placement of the house allows "a glimpse of the sea over the brick wall."

There's one catch, and the architects state it plainly: "The wall, however, has not yet been built." The design's most consequential gesture — the enclosure that frames the garden and screens the sea view — remains on paper. When it goes up, the house will gain the private garden its plan has promised from the start; until then, the composition waits for its second half.