Dream Home To Be Pulled Down

Wanganui Chronicle, 4 November 1949, Page 6

Dream Home To Be Pulled Down

(By a Reuter Correspondent in Stockholm). Northern Europe’s most gaudy "Love Nest” with a blue chimney and tender inscriptions on the walls is to be pulled down. With it disappears all that is left, of the life-long dream of Hilding and Ida Holm—a dream which only came true when they married in their old age. Hilding fell in love with Ida as a young man, but her parents in the little medieval central Swedish town of Vadstena opposed the match. Hilding, seeking a home for the bride he knew he would one day win, chose a three storey wooden villa, dedicated it to “Cupid and the Fatherland” and began to work on it in his own striking way. The front door and the windows each side of it are made of glass—red, blue and yellow glass. There is an orange verandah and another verandah with crossed Swedish flags and posies of brightly coloured flowers intermingled. A border with the same design runs across the four yellow walls of the house. The roof is a chaste grey, but Hilding put up a blue chimney and a red flagstaff to relieve the monotony. In the main living room is a little hinged panel. It hides a photograph of Hilding and Ida with their faces close to each other. The caption reads: "If you kiss me I shall scream for help.” Roses grow over other pictures of the pair and their initials are entwined. When they were in their sixties and the “love nest” was long finished all Ida’s relations died and she was at last able to marry her Hilding. For years they fixed in their home before dying in their eighties during the war.

Inhabitants of Vadstena who had watched their idyll had hoped the house would remain as a monument to their patience and affection. But the Town Council decided Hilding’s dream house must be pulled down and replaced by a block of cold modern concrete flats.