Islands fit for Ingmar Bergman

Who would have thought of staying in a factory? My view is of a grey industrial building, a gravel pile and a crane  standing like a metal giraffe at the end of the pier. It’s not your usual picture-postcard hotel vista, but it’s oddly beautiful.

Instead of following the masses to the Mediterranean, we had headed north to the Baltic islands off Sweden’s coast. Gotland is Sweden’s biggest island, and it’s here that the Fabriken Furillen hotel sits, on a remote peninsula in the far northeast of the island.

This hotel is the brainchild of photographer Johan Hellstöm. It takes an unusual man to see that an abandoned limestone quarry could be a hotel. Swallows swish past, leaving their home in a building previously used to house the conveyor belts for transporting the limestone. Close by, nestled on the edge of the Baltic Sea in front of a gravel hill, is an incongruous American Airstream caravan, and near that, the tunnel that was formerly used by the trains carrying the limestone.