Myrholmen Private Island

Selma Lagerlöf called Sörmland Sweden's pleasure garden. From Myrholmen's docks, you understand why before your coffee cools.

The island sits in Djulösjön, the lake at the heart of a province that holds 400 lakes and as many castles. Across the water, the white facade of Stora Djulö Manor has stood since the 1720s, on grounds first recorded in 1334. Lagerlöf wrote that very view into The Wonderful Adventures of Nils as the Beautiful Pleasure Garden, where Nils Holgersson rested on his journey across Sweden. From your dock, you see what he saw.

What Myrholmen Is

A small island. The name itself tells you so. Holmen means islet, and Myrholmen earns the word. You can walk its perimeter in minutes.

But small means intimate, not constrained. There are docks in three directions: east for morning light, south for the long Swedish afternoon, west for sunsets that linger past ten in June. Wherever the day puts you, the sun is there too.

The Buildings

Four structures, each doing its job without apology.

The main house holds the master bedroom, with space for a double and a single bed, and the kitchen. The kitchen runs on gas: a stove, a fridge, and a freezer compartment, all powered without a wire to the mainland. Off-grid by design, not by compromise.

The guest cottage adds three more sleeping places. Six guests in total, with no one giving up a bed.

The sauna is wood-fired. The cool Nordic summer night demands it; the lake, three steps away, finishes the job. Swedes built an entire summer culture around this single ritual, and on Myrholmen you have it to yourself.

The fourth building houses a dry toilet, the unglamorous detail that makes a freshwater island work.

The Setting

You are three kilometres from the centre of Katrineholm, and a short row from Stora Djulö Manor itself, which now operates a café, restaurant, and ice cream bar with outdoor seating along the same shore you wake up to. The Djulö canoe club shares that shoreline. So does the manor's medieval stable, now a folk museum, and a hostel run inside the old red estate buildings, the oldest dating from the 1600s.

Beyond Djulösjön lies all of Sörmland: roughly 400 manor houses (more than any other Swedish province), the 1,000-kilometre Sörmlandsleden hiking trail, deer and wild boar in the forests, and the white water-lily (the provincial flower) opening in the quieter bays of your own lake. The regional tourism board calls it Stockholm Country Break. It is the countryside that Stockholm itself escapes to.

The Practicalities

• Stockholm Central to Katrineholm: 52 minutes by direct train, hourly service, every day of the year.
• Skavsta Airport is closer still, with flights to most of Europe.
• Mainland easements: three parking spaces and a private dock, so you and your guests reach the island the same way the original owners did.
• Included in the sale: a rowboat.
• Utilities: gas-fired appliances throughout; the island is off-grid by design.

The arithmetic is simple. You leave Stockholm after a Friday meeting, reach Katrineholm in under an hour, row across, and have your feet in the lake before the sun touches the pines.

What You Are Buying

Not a mansion. Not a compound. A small island with everything a thoughtful Swedish family would build for a hundred summers, and nothing they would not.

Selma Lagerlöf was right about the pleasure garden. Myrholmen is the part she did not put in the book.