For most of the twentieth century, the legend of Scandinavian art, design and architecture grew and grew; an austerely simple yet humane design effortlessly in harmony with nature. Yet somehow Norway was never part of this. Facing the North Atlantic it seemed distant, more attuned to the brilliant melancholy of Grieg, Ibsen and Munch. But that is only a part of the story, and this tour combines landscape, art and design to give a fuller sense of Norway’s extraordinary beauty and creativity.

In the folds of the fjords there have always been some of the most remarkable wooden buildings and towns – and boats – in Europe, while already in the 1930s Arne Korsmo’s beautiful villas above Oslofjord showed a particular Norwegian modernism. In the last two generations, bolstered by the extraordinary well-invested wealth of their oil reserves, the Norwegians have set about designing a society to match the beauty of their setting, and place them at the forefront of contemporary design.

We begin in Oslo, which in the last few years has become one of Europe’s most civilized and elegant cities, now crowned by Snøhetta’s astonishing Opera House. Its sheltered location and wide bourgeois streets could not contrast more than with the drama of Bergen and its dense wooden Hansa Bryggen where we end. However, both cities host great collections of paintings that show the fine eye and great skill with which Norwegians have observed their milieu.

As with everywhere else in Norway, water dominates. In fact the story of Norwegian design really begins with our visit to the Viking longboats and continues at the Urnes stave church which overlooks the bucolic Sognefjord two hundred miles inland. We travel there from Oslo on one of the most beautiful train journeys imaginable, and then sail across the fjord to the beguiling timber Hotel Mundal. We leave for Bergen again by boat, following the fjord to the Atlantic.

It is in the tiny town of Mundal, lying in the shadow of Norway’s largest glacier, that Sverre Fehn built his ‘Bremuseum’ (glacier museum). Fehn, who died in 2009, produced an architecture of intelligence and poetry that has made him the subject of veneration unmatched since Alvar Aalto. His Hedmark museum in Hamar, one of the most significant interpretations of an historic site in Europe, is simply extraordinary.

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