JUNE 29 — The first thing you notice is the metal fence.
At Bungenas, a remote peninsula of mostly untouched wilderness on the north-eastern tip of Gotland, a Swedish island, arriving visitors must park their cars and continue on foot or on two wheels past the rusted gate – a remnant of the area’s past as a restricted military training facility. Peaceful and isolated, the Bergmanesque landscape has now been transformed into a dreamy natural playground for in-the-know Swedes.
“It was ‘the last stand in Sweden,’ they say, because if there was going to be nuclear war, this was going to be the place to be protected,” said Joachim Kuylenstierna, a real estate developer who, envisioning a summertime utopia amid the site’s abandoned bunkers and pine trees, bought the nearly 400-acre property in 2007.
“No public people have been allowed to visit this area since 1963, so nobody knew that it existed,” he said. “I thought that if I opened a coffee shop there, maybe someone would find it.”
That coffee shop, which would later be called Nystroms, opened quietly in 2008 in a former commissary for workers of Bungenas Kalkbrott, a defunct limestone quarry that predated the military facilities. But finding an architecture firm to perform the renovations proved difficult, so Kuylenstierna started his own, Skalso Arkitekter.
Intentionally relying solely on word-of-mouth instead of advertising, Bungenas began to attract a trickle of day-trippers who had caught wind of an unusual cafe in the middle of nowhere. Still, Kuylenstierna used other barriers to maintain the area’s mysterious aura.
“The idea was to keep the fence because I hate people who go and see nature in the car,” he said. “If you don’t get out of the car, you can’t smell the nature and you don’t feel the nature.”
The long-term plan was to build a community of unobtrusive well-designed summer homes, but Kuylenstierna first focused on a smaller project with the restaurateur Sonny Gustafsson.
“He asked me if I wanted to come see this beautiful place called Bungenas,” Gustafsson said. “And he showed me an old building that was totally worn down and shot to pieces from the military, and he said, ‘I want to open a restaurant here, and I want you to do it.’”
After a renovation, the World War II-era canteen opened as Bungenas Matsal in 2012. And word soon got out that Bungenas also had a fine-dining restaurant worth traveling for.
Surprised by the first season’s success, Gustafsson recruited Johan Stromberg and his wife, Eva Toivonen (together the couple run the restaurant Bolaget in Visby, the main city on Gotland), to join the team. In 2013, the three opened a five-room hotel and turned Kalkladan, an old limestone storage barn, into a cavernous space for art exhibitions, music and other performances with its own bistro and bar. Last summer, Kalkladan hosted a concert series featuring top Swedish artists, which drew crowds of curious visitors.
Increasingly, Bungenas has surfaced on social media: photos of cyclists dwarfed by jagged cliffs in the abandoned quarry, of sunbathers on metal military cots overlooking the Baltic Sea.
Now, eight years into the evolving project, Kuylenstierna said: “It’s not a fairy tale anymore. Its true.” — The New York Times
