A House That Held an Art Collection: The Story of Laugavegur 37

Laugavegur 37 is a timber house on Reykjavík's main street, built in 1906. For most of the twentieth century it was a clothing shop, later the city's well-known Levi's store. Upstairs, the family who owned it built one of the most significant private collections of contemporary art in the Nordic countries, and for a time opened the house itself as a gallery and then a museum. Today it is the Collector's House, part of MUSE.

A house on the wash road

The house was built in the years when Reykjavík was turning from a town into a capital. Laugavegur means the wash road. It was named after the path women once walked out to the hot springs in Laugardalur to do the laundry, and by the early 1900s it was becoming the city's main street.

Like its neighbours, number 37 was built of timber, two storeys with a basement and attic, a house for living and trading at once. Behind it stands an even older building, Laugavegur 37b, a small timber house from 1894 and one of the oldest in the neighbourhood.

The main house changed with the street. In 1955 large shop windows were cut into its front, as Laugavegur became Iceland's most important shopping street. In 1976 a concrete extension was added at the back.

Denim downstairs

For decades the ground floor belonged to fashion. This was the address of Faco, the clothing business of the Arason family, and later of Levi's búðin. For generations of Icelanders, this was quite simply where you came to buy your jeans. The merchant Pétur Arason held the Levi's agency for Iceland and ran the shop from this building.

Art upstairs

Pétur was also leading a second life. From around 1960, on his regular business trips abroad, he spent his free hours in the museums and galleries of Amsterdam, London and elsewhere, and began to buy art. With his wife, the artist Ragna Róbertsdóttir, he built a collection centred on Minimal, Conceptual and Fluxus work. It was not a collection of decoration. It was a collection of ideas.

Önnur hæð, the Second Floor

Between 1992 and 1997, Pétur and Ragna, together with the artist Ingólfur Arnarsson, ran an exhibition space in their own home on the upper floor of the house. They called it Önnur hæð, Second Floor. Leading international artists were invited to show here, often making work directly for these rooms. Artists who exhibited included Lawrence Weiner and Dieter Roth, alongside a generation of Icelandic artists.

It was a small, private, serious space, and it had an influence on Icelandic art far beyond its size.

SAFN

In 2003 Pétur sold the Levi's business, closed the shop and gave the whole house to art. SAFN, meaning collection, opened as a contemporary art museum across three floors, in collaboration with the City of Reykjavík. Until 2008, visitors could walk through the collection and around fifty exhibitions of Icelandic and international artists, including Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Ceal Floyer, Karin Sander and Roman Signer.

For those five years, one of the quietest and most radical art spaces in Northern Europe stood behind the shop windows of a clothing store on Laugavegur.

The collection has since moved on, to new SAFN spaces in Reykjavík and Berlin. The house stayed where it was.

The Collector's House today

When we took on the house, we wanted it to remember what it had been. It now holds six apartments, each with its own character, and the rooms where artists once installed their work are now rooms where people stay a while. One apartment, the Gallery, sits on a floor that was once part of Önnur hæð. The Artist Studio opens onto the garden at the back.

We did not want to turn the house into a museum of itself. We wanted it to feel like a home that happens to have lived an unusual life.

Seeing more

If the story interests you, Reykjavík has good places to follow it. i8 Gallery on Tryggvagata is the country's most internationally known gallery. The National Gallery of Iceland holds significant work by Dieter Roth. The Living Art Museum, Nýló, in the Marshall House at Grandi, has been home to experimental Icelandic art since the 1970s.

You can stay at Laugavegur 37 through themuse.is.