Alfheim Lodge
Lake Valhalla, Cold Spring, New York

Alfheim - "Home of the Elves" in old Norse mythology

Alfheim Lodge – the reconstruction of a Rustic Storybook Style lodge at Valhalla Highlands, Cold Spring, New York.

Valhalla Highlands was initiated in the early 1930s as a stylistically cohesive summer community with individual lodges, shared common facilities and amenities, including Lake Valhalla, community buildings and a 1,100 acre forest with trails and rustic facilities.

All the lodges were placed on a planned layout with a carefully organized system of boulder-lined unpaved roads, vistas and landscape features. No two lodges were the same and the community was harmoniously placed within its magnificent natural setting. The District was an early occurrence of seasonal retreats for New Yorkers in the rural areas of the Hudson Valley during the first decades of the twentieth century.

The lodges, roads, common facilities and landscaping were a unique rustic interpretation of the Storybook Style popular in America between World War I and World War II. With whimsy and creative playfulness, the Valhalla Highlands interpretation was picturesque and nostalgic. These qualities were evident in the buttressed fieldstone and half-log walls, swooping multi-color asphalt shingle roofs with peaks, asymmetrical roof pitches, prominent fieldstone chimneys, cantilevered entry canopies, free-standing peeled log arches at the entrances, window awnings, half-log flower boxes, small-paned steel and wood windows, fieldstone paths and steps, boulder borders, rock gardens with elf figurines and knotty pine interiors. The ensemble blurred the line of fantasy and reality with an inherent sense of humor.

The playful, fairy-tale aesthetic of Valhalla Highlands matched the community’s theme of a Nordic paradise.

In the summer of 2013, Joseph Pell Lombardi reconstructed Alfheim Lodge at Lake Valhalla in the Rustic Storybook Style vocabulary for which the community is noted.

Photo Credits:
AI / Arclight Images for Buffalo Lumber
NS/ Nisha Sondhe