Fabriken Furillen, is a small eco hotel that opened in 2000

"K2T Wisata"

Fabriken Furillen, is a small eco hotel that opened in 2000 and expanded for the better part of the next decade. The brief flight from Stockholm descended into fog at little Visby Airport. Then the 45-minute drive to Furillen a wiper-whipping swim along narrow roads until it slowly lightened to a mist. Furillen is itself an islet in the Baltic Sea off the northeastern coast of Gotland. Unlike Faro, the island just to the north that Ingmar Bergman long called home, a ferry ride isn’t required to get there. Craggy limestone formations loomed to the side of the road like tipsy sentries. Just before dipping to sea level and reaching the causeway to Furillen, the road traversed odd, empty, unnatural pools—as if a giant had taken an ice cream scoop to the earth, the flavor of the day being cement.

Everyting about Furillen is little wierd! What kind of person would look at an old cement factory (fabriken) operating out of a limestone quarry, dormant for some 30 years, and see the bones of a hotel? It would have to be someone as visionary as a photographer used to conceptualizing and improvising while on assignment in exotic locations. Tired of being on the road much of the year, away from family, Johan Hellstrom moved permanently to Furillen in 1999, first renovating the factory with his wife, Anna-Karin, as a studio before expanding it into a hotel. The idea was to promote the factory as much as a location for photo shoots as an unusual escape.

At Fabriken, the visual trumps all else. Heavy chains still hang from the ceiling of the former workers’ canteen; they’re no longer used, except as a super-scale necklace-like adornment. Large single-pane windows in the dining room frame a Charles Sheeleresque image of a hulking concrete tower next to a gargantuan heap of slag. There is a rugged, surreal, even romantic allure to the setting that the overcast sky only abetted, allowing all the subtle shades of gray to emerge. Like sound carrying across water, a woman in a bright orange jacket could be seen in the fog, sharp as a spark, way down the beach. One can only imagine the scenes Bergman, were he still filming, could have produced here.

Locally sourced sheepskin rugs and handcrafted Midcentury furniture give the seemingly spare six cabins an alluring warmth, while Bang & Olufsen stereos and flat-screen TV’s lend the 15 rooms in the main house a modern edge. Fabriken Furillen is so unusual a place, one of such brutal beauty, that despite its faults, it will stay with you far longer than you will stay with it.