Food and Accommodation

The green house is known as Loftet or Logen. Its name suggests that it was once a farm building before becoming a summer house. Old photographs show hay stored in the loft.
Villa Ekudden was built in the 1880s. Its dark exterior, irregular shape and originally open verandas are typical of the period.

A stay at the spa followed a fixed timetable for every activity, including meals. Breakfast was served fairly late, between nine and ten, allowing guests time to take the waters and perhaps a morning bath. The main meal, consisting of four or five courses for the wealthy, was served at midday. The evening meal was usually eaten at around seven. The boys at the children’s home also ate at fixed times, but their meals were considerably simpler.
Gustafsberg’s cattle were kept in the nearby barn. In summer they grazed in the field now occupied by Landbadet. Farming continued here until 1955.

Read more about the very different food provided to spa guests and pupils at Gustafsberg:

Extract from Elisabeth Mansén, A Paradise on Earth (2001):

“Detailed accounts of food directly from spa guests are rare, but Anna Lisa Geijer’s letters from Gustafsberg in 1839 contain several notes. The Swedish summer appears here in one of its most appealing forms. Every day the guests eat raspberries and milk. In other accounts, wild strawberries and cream predominate.
Fresh fish and shellfish are among the west-coast specialities. Lobster was already a luxury food and was served on festive occasions, even in the hottest part of summer. Someone is frequently reported to have fallen ill, and Mrs Geijer rarely feels she has been served a truly good lobster. Her suspicion of fish may have been personal, but may also partly reflect the period. She finds salt-water fish nauseatingly soft, delicate and sweet. A type of fish previously unknown to her, plaice, she finds positively disgusting. Cod is better, but salmon is really the only fish she enjoys. It is almost impossible to determine in detail whether the dietary rules of past times were right or wrong.”

Extract from Granfelt, Gustavsberg Children’s Home and Seaside Resort, with Gullmarsberg and Its Estates: A 150th Anniversary (1926):

“A vivid and interesting account of the food situation in the early 19th century was given by a former Gustafsberg pupil, the late district police superintendent in Uddevalla, Anders Mellqvist.
On 9 August 1809, he left his parental home, where, poor though it was, he had been accustomed to living well compared with the strict diet, or rather starvation cure, that he and his companions were forced to endure here for eight full years:

Four meals a day, it is true, but they were meagre indeed. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, the porridge bell called them to breakfast at seven, in winter and summer alike. Anyone too slow to complete his otherwise simple and modest toilet became a ‘cederare’, as they called the unfortunate boy who failed to reach the dining room before the bell’s final stroke. Woe to him: he had to return with an empty stomach, quietly protesting at the slowness of the legs beneath it.

Friday and Saturday brought the same fare. Thursday and Sunday mornings, by contrast, offered a feast: one quarter of a loaf of unsifted rye crispbread, in the centre of which lay about four lod of butter, not infrequently old and rancid, carefully spread by each boy using an old so-called Marbo table knife.

The narrator can no longer remember exactly what was served for dinner on every day of the week, but three days remain vivid: Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. From late autumn until spring, year after year, sauerkraut was served in large wooden bowls or pewter dishes, and there was certainly no stinting on this splendid dish. It was said to be good and healthy for polar explorers as a preventive and cure for scurvy, but a child’s palate and stomach recoiled from it. And when one adds that the cabbage was boiled with meat from old, worn-out draught oxen brought in autumn from the foundation’s Gullmarsberg estate, taken directly from the plough to the slaughter bench, one can easily imagine what a tasty and nourishing dish resulted. Each boy received an ample portion of meat, two pieces on every pewter plate, but no potatoes, only a piece of dry rye bread. The cabbage, carrots and swedes also came from Gullmarsberg and, while supplies lasted, were served in a kind of grain soup cooked with salted meat from the same cattle. Salt pork was occasionally served, though rarely, from old boars that had spent their strength breeding before being castrated and fattened. The resulting pork, dear reader, was tougher than rubber and smelled appalling.

There was as little restraint with this as with the sauerkraut.
Various strange dishes, which the narrator had seen neither before nor since, were also served on unspecified days. One was a kind of grain porridge cooked with salted ling and tasting of lime. The pieces of fish in the porridge always constituted the accompaniment, with no potatoes.

Mellqvist wrote this in the 1860s. Expectations rose thereafter, and Gustafsberg may be said to have kept pace with the times. Under different housekeepers, the food was at times better or worse prepared and more or less varied. On the whole, however, it satisfied the boys, and in any event they no longer had to starve.”