All Islands For Sale

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.

The waters around Culion are the same waters around Coron. The same archipelago, the same limestone karst rising out of the same blue. The difference is how few people have heard of Culion, and how completely those waters have remained themselves as a result. Culion was sealed off from the world for exactly one hundred years, from 1906 until the World Health Organization declared the island leprosy-free in 2006. A century of low development is rare on a tropical archipelago. The reefs survived it. The mangroves survived it. The light on the water in the late afternoon, when the sun drops behind the karst islands to the west, is what tropical light was before tourism found the tropics. Today the local tourism office uses one official phrase to describe Culion: *Paradise Regained*. The town keeps a coral-rock church built in the 1700s from blocks of fossilised reef, a 1740 Spanish fort, and an archive inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. The bay holds Japanese WWII shipwrecks now overgrown with coral, ranked among the finest wreck dives in the world. This listing covers two adjacent islets in those waters, near the well-known sandbar of Cheron Island, in the same bay as the overwater bungalows of Two Seasons Coron Island Resort. ## The Land Two lots. One acre between them. - **Lot A:** 2,360 sqm - **Lot B:** 1,653 sqm - **Combined:** 4,013 sqm These are not large parcels. They are intimate ones, the size where a thoughtful house, a swimming dock, and a small garden are exactly enough, and where every step takes you closer to the water rather than further from it. The water itself is the asset. Calamian water is the kind divers fly across continents to find: clear enough at noon to read a book through, warm year-round, and full of life. From your own dock you will see schools of needlefish in the shallows and, on still mornings, the silhouettes of the karst islands of Coron Bay rising in the distance like an unfinished sentence. ## What Surrounds You **Two Seasons Coron Island Resort & Spa** sits in the same bay, with overwater bungalows, a private beach, and a full spa. Owners building on islands in this part of Palawan often use a resort like this as their base during construction, and as overflow for the kind of guests who want a proper bed within walking distance of the bar. **Culion town** is a 30-minute speedboat ride away. The plaza, the coral-rock Immaculate Conception Church, the museum with its UNESCO-inscribed archives, the small market, the easy rhythm of a place that knows exactly what it is. **Coron town** sits across the strait for shopping, restaurants, and onward connections. **The reefs and lagoons** of Kayangan Lake, Twin Lagoons, Barracuda Lake, and the wrecks of Coron Bay are all within day-trip range of your own dock. ## Access - **By air:** Manila or Cebu to Francisco B. Reyes Airport on Busuanga Island. Roughly 75 minutes from Manila, daily flights. - **From the airport:** Van and boat transfer to Culion, then a smaller boat to the islets. - **Once in the Calamians:** Boats are the road network, and a small private boat is part of the pleasure of an island home here. --- The waters around Culion are the same waters around Coron. The difference, for now, is how few people have heard of Culion.