At Huset, the world’s northernmost fine dining restaurant in Longyearbyen, Norwegian practice Snøhetta chose not to erase eighty years of improvised repairs and mismatched materials inside the building — it built the new interior directly out of that accumulated eclecticism. Completed in 1951 as a gathering place for the Svalbard mining community, the building has cycled through functions from cinema to hospital to concert hall, absorbing whatever materials were on hand at each turn. That inherited patchwork, rather than a blank canvas, became the starting point for a redesign meant to hold its own against polar night, midnight sun, and a supply chain that depends on ships crossing the Barents Sea.
A building with a long memory anchors the project before any design decision does. Huset has served as a church, a hospital, a sports hall, a school, a post office, a cinema, and — since 1977 — a restaurant, today paired with one of Scandinavia’s largest wine cellars. Saturday steak dinners still draw locals to the adjoining bistro, a detail the redesign had to respect rather than override.
Sourcing from a sparse landscape shapes the kitchen as much as any material choice shapes the room. Longyearbyen’s permafrost and low tundra vegetation leave little to work with directly, so the team leans on Nordic preservation techniques and close ties to local trappers, fishers, and foragers. “Everything starts with what we can find here. The fjords, the tundra, the seasons — and we build from there,” said Head Chef Alberto Lozano.
Contrast as concept runs through the entire brief. Svalbard’s environment offers little middle ground — stillness against storm, total darkness against continuous daylight — and the design leans into that rather than smoothing it out, treating the shifts in light as a variable the interior has to keep answering to rather than a problem to solve once.
Two-toned stained oak forms the continuous base of the fixed elements and bespoke furniture, a choice drawn from the many wood species that make up the coffered ceiling of what was once the building’s cinema hall — a quiet nod to the room’s own history rather than an imported reference.
Stone, linoleum, and steel complete the material register. Öland stone, already present on parts of the existing flooring, resurfaces in the counters and a large dining table; red linoleum flooring picks up the tones of the surrounding landscape; and stainless steel introduces a harder, reflective layer that references Svalbard’s mining and industrial past.
Textiles double as architecture rather than decoration. A continuous run of panels in three layers of transparent fabric produces a natural moiré effect that shifts with the light through the day, while also softening the acoustics and hiding technical installations. The same fabric reappears in movable panels set into timber frames along the window walls, letting the team filter daylight without losing the view.
Lighting had to answer to extremes most interiors never face. Working with Anker & Co, the team built a scheme combining ambient, integrated, and accent lighting designed to function through both the midnight sun and months of polar night — the pendant light Cone, designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune for Wästberg, anchors the scheme. “One of the most important takeaways from this project is that transformation is not a limitation, but a tremendous opportunity,”said Marlene Fenger Vedal, Team Lead Interior at Snøhetta, describing a build that also had to absorb an eight-week delay while the transport ship underwent repairs.
Custom furniture carries the material story into the dining room itself. Snøhetta designed two table types — a round version on a cone-shaped base, and an elliptical long table topped in Öland stone — paired with solid Swedish pine chairs by Simmer, all supplied by Verk. It’s a material logic close to the one OMA worked through at its Oberon restaurant for the New Museum, where a single distinctive material was left to carry the room’s identity rather than compete with it. In an adjacent chambre séparée, closed off with fabric-clad screen doors, a three-metre (10 ft) custom oak table sits beneath a lantern by Santa & Cole — the one fixture in the room that answers to nothing but the doorway it hangs in.
Huset Restaurant by Snøhetta | Location: Vei 300, Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway