Höfði House
Prefabricated timber villa shipped from Norway, later the wooden venue of a Cold War summit.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Höfði House in Reykjavik begins with an odd fact: the grand wooden villa overlooking the harbor was never built here at all, but shipped from Norway in numbered timber pieces and bolted together in 1909, since Iceland had almost no trees of its own. Paid for by the French consul, it later passed through a poet, a painter's family and the British embassy before the city bought it for civic receptions in 1958. Stand in the thin-walled room where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev later sat down together in October 1986.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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