“We don’t want to be
“We don’t want to be a luxury hotel – that’s not what we’re offering,” says Steinar Sørli, as we walk across the grounds of his beautifully restored, 137-year-old family farm in Norway’s fjord lands. It is a delightfully offbeat remark in our age of increasingly obsequious hospitality, a hint that here at Åmot, the customer – contra the American adage – is not king. Sørli is laidback and confident as he describes what the property does, and does not, offer, with the hills of the rural Norwegian countryside rising above us from all sides. He has the wisdom to know that he shouldn’t overpromise and that, given his idiosyncratic approach, he has to communicate clearly with all potential visitors. “We are most concerned about matching with guests,” he says in his disarmingly direct manner. “Two cultures have to meet.” You might expect this talk of matching and of cultures meeting to be better suited to a schoolexchange programme rather than a place where guests spend upwards of several thousand dollars per person per night to hire the entire estate. At most private-hire properties around the globe, that kind of nightly spend will get you pretty much anything you want. Here, it gets you only what they give you, albeit with quite a lot of tailoring. “We spend a lot of time speaking with guests before arrival,” says Sørli, explaining that he discusses activities and food preferences with clients in addition to priming them, before booking, for the tone and tenor of the visit. “Some people,” he notes, “aren’t interested in too much authenticity.” Guests are welcome to bring their own staff – and many do – but the point of the place is not an isolated escape in the middle of nowhere. Coming to Åmot means coming to a particular somewhere and exploring it alongside the locals. Scandinavian hospitality is not world renowned. There is great food, excellent design and groundbreaking architecture at the best hotels, but the people, often, are not much warmer than the Arctic climate. Sørli and his husband, Yngve Brakstad, are much kinder than average, but then they don’t consider themselves to be hoteliers. Brakstad, in fact, is an architect, and he is most responsible for the sensitive, beautiful renovations of the grounds that started in 2002 and in 2010 earned the pair a national conservation award (which is commemorated by a stone from the Oslo Opera House that sits in the property’s courtyard garden). Realising they had a gem on their hands, Sørli and Brakstad hosted events during the restoration for friends coming up from Bergen (where they also have a home), which progressed quickly from small concerts and weddings to things like a performance by international opera star Kiri Te Kanawa and a visit from Norway’s Queen. Ten years ago, they opened up the property to fellow Norwegians to come and stay, and word of mouth eventually led them to host small groups from superyachts that made their way into nearby Sunnfjord – which is thinner and less dramatic than the region’s best-known fjords but has the incredibly charming virtue of being inaccessible to cruise ships. Åmot began courting foreigners for overnight visits in 2019, creating bespoke experiences for 46 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
Steinar Sørli (left), Yngve Brakstad and their dog Mimmi; opposite: dining under a dynamic chandelier in the barn CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 47
