Straumshorn Hotell sits at the end of a small wooded headland on the south shore of Storfjorden, two and a half kilometres west of Stranda village on the road toward Hellesylt. The property is a converted 1934 herring-salting station, decommissioned in 1969 with the herring collapse and used intermittently as a youth hostel in the 1970s. We bought it from the Stranda municipality in 2017: Lars Aune and Mette Vassbø, a Sunnmøre family of three generations of fishery hands and one generation of hoteliers.
We worked with the architect Synnøve Eide, of Ålesund, over three winters — stripping back the cement render that had been added to the salting-house in 1957, rebuilding the south-facing window reveals to the original 1934 specification, replacing the failed roof structure with proper Voss slate, building the new dining-hall pavilion on the boathouse footprint, and rebuilding the badstu over the fjord with a single plate-glass window onto the water. We reopened in June 2020, after the unhurried timing the building deserved.
Who runs the hotel
The day-to-day is run by our son Eirik Aune-Vassbø, who took over as manager in 2023 after eight years at the Storfjord Hotel in Skodje. Marit Brekke is the head housekeeper; her colleague Ingvild has been with us since opening and runs the breakfast service. The kitchen is run by Tore Strand, who came to us from the Brosundet in Ålesund, and Bjørn Mehren is the porter and the driver of the long-wheelbase Volvo from Hellesylt.
Lars and Mette still live in the small house at the back of the birch wood; Eirik has the upper room of the warden's quarters with the dormer window over the fjord; reception is generally staffed by Eirik, by Bjørn in the evenings, and by Marit on Saturdays.
The herring-station, 1934 to the present
The Straumshornstasjon was built in 1934 by the Sunnmøre Fiskersamlag, the regional fishermen's co-operative, on a site they had used informally since the 1880s. The warden's quarters are in the restrained late-functionalist register of the period, with their double-pitch roof, painted board-and-batten cladding, and deep-reveal windows. The salting-house — a longer, plainer building down toward the boathouse — is older in its foundations, with cellar courses that the conservation survey dates tentatively to 1881.
The property is on the Riksantikvaren register under reference 167-04, listed in 2008, and any external alteration is reviewed by the regional cultural-heritage office at Molde before work begins. The restoration was carried out under planning approval Stranda kommune ref. 2017/812, and the conservation report by Synnøve Eide is held in the hotel office and available for inspection by guests on request.
Storfjorden, plainly described
Storfjorden is a long, narrow inland fjord, branching east from the open Atlantic at Ålesund and reaching seventy kilometres inland to its head at Geiranger. At the Straumshornet headland the fjord is just under a kilometre across and around four hundred metres deep at the centre, sheltered from the open sea but with a strong tide-race at the headland itself that gives the property its name — straum being the local word for current and horn for the headland.
The land rises sharply from the water to the snow line, with steep birch and pine wood for the first three hundred metres and bare rock above. White-tailed eagles nest in the cliff west of the property and the otters that work the headland through October may be seen from the dining-hall window in the early evening. The Geiranger Fjord, ten kilometres east by the Ørnesvingen mountain road, is on the UNESCO World Heritage list and is the principal day-trip from the hotel.