Bostan, Novobërdë
Our Story
A family, a slope, eight houses
We did not set out to build a hotel. We set out to build one house on our own land, and then we kept going until there were eight of them and a kitchen to feed everybody.
The ground above Bostan has been in the family a long time: grazing at the top, an orchard where the slope flattens out, and a small lake at the bottom that nobody had much use for. For years it was somewhere we came at weekends to cut wood and eat outside. The first house was meant to be for us.
It was finished in the spring, and by that summer friends were staying in it, then friends of friends. The second house went up because the first one was never free. By the time the fourth was standing we had stopped calling it a private project and started writing the dates down in a proper book.
Before the houses
The land, before we touched it
The slope faces south-west, which is why the light stays on it late into the evening and why the snow leaves this side of the hill first. The water sits at the bottom of it, with a footpath along the shore.
The pines on the upper ground were planted in rows and then left alone for fifty years. They are the reason the houses look the way they do. Before we drew anything we spent a summer clearing bracken and working out where the ground was firm enough to take a footing.
The timber
Nearly every board in these houses came off the slope they stand on.
We felled through the winter, when the sap is down, and stacked the timber under cover at the top of the orchard to dry. Two summers later we were still cutting and planing it ourselves, which is slower than buying it in, and the reason the houses smell the way they do.
The short version
Eight pine houses above the water, a restaurant that opens this September, and a hill that has been worth climbing since the 1320s.
Bostan, Novobërdë
1320s
First recorded
Novobërdë enters the record: a fortress on the ridge above these hills, with a mining town growing under its walls.
1349
Its own coin
The town strikes silver in its own mint. At its height the hill gives up some six tonnes a year, more than any other mine in the Balkans.
1412
Its own law
The Mining Code: fifty-one articles on the mines and twenty-two on the town, written for this hill alone.
2026
BioLand
Six hundred years on, eight pine houses in four kinds stand above the water at Bostan, and the restaurant below them serves for the first time on 12 September.
What happens next
The restaurant opens
The restaurant is the last of the buildings and the one that took the longest. It stands at the top of the garden with the wood oven built into the end wall, and it opens onto the terrace, so for most of the summer the tables will be outside.
The menu will be short and will change often: bread out of the oven, whatever the garden is giving that week, lamb from the next valley. Guests staying in the villas will not need a table booked.
First service
12 September 2026
Where you would stay
What came of it: eight houses in the slope's own pine, beds for thirty-eight, and the water at the bottom of the garden.