The house across from the church
The veranda faces south, across the road to Högstena church, a white-rendered church that Svenska kyrkan dates to the 1100s or early 1200s. The house behind it is red-painted timber under a tiled mansard roof, built in 1922, and its whole upper floor is one studio open to the ridge, with windows on three sides.
Alvhem gives the architect as lokal förmåga, a local hand, and the style as tjugotalsklassicism, the Swedish classicism of the 1920s. A central gable with two windows marks the middle of the front, the veranda's joinery is painted linden green with ochre posts, and a stone wall along the road takes up the fall of the ground, with a path between two stone gateposts to the veranda steps.
Built for the teacher
The listing's history begins with a photograph of 1923: Gerda Hermansson, newly qualified and new to her post in the village, stands with her pupils in front of the new house. By the account the listing gives, she never moved in. She married the shopkeeper instead, and the house, for all its name, never served as a teacher's residence. She kept the post until 1952, and teaching in Högstena ended in 1954, when the children went to school in Stenstorp.
Svenska kyrkan's own history of the church across the road can be read in its roof: seven medieval trusses at the east end, five from the 1700s in the middle and five from 1907 at the west, where the church was twice lengthened. A stream from Plantaberget runs beside the west wall of the churchyard.
What the rooms hold
The ground floor runs in a circle. The hall is papered in Sandberg's Elizabeth. The kitchen has pale green cabinets, white tile above the range and the sink, a checkered floor, Duro's Lilla Dockekulla on the walls, windows on two sides and a door to the back garden. A corner library is shelved on all four walls. The living room and the bedroom each keep a tiled stove that still burns, and the bedroom has a walk-in closet with its own small window. The bathroom is white tile over a terracotta-red clinker floor.
Upstairs, the studio takes the whole floor under rough-hewn beams, with board walls, plank floors and a wood stove against the chimney stack; the listing notes it can be divided into more bedrooms. The plot is 1,559 square meters, about 0.39 acre, with lawns under large deciduous trees and, on the far side, a view over fields and red farm buildings.
