The Old Peoples home

Balestrand Gamleheim

On 10 October 1920, Balestrand Gamleheim old people’s home was officially opened with great pomp and ceremony. After five years of planning and tenacious fundraising, the village could finally boast ‘a pleasant and good home for the old and weak of Tjugum and Vangsnes parishes’.

The old people’s home had many generous benefactors, and architect Henrik Halding did not charge for the drawings of the building.

Jacob Gerhard Meidell

The building however was not brand new. The oldest part dates back to 1855, when military captain Jacob Gerhard Meidell from Flesje decided that Sande would be a suitable place to build a home. A water colour painting shows what the main house looked like in his day. You can still recognise the characteristic stone steps, windows, flag pole and garden wall. This is despite the house being extended twice in the early 1900s; first by the founder of Vadheim Elektrochemiske Fabriker, Edgar Arthur Ashcroft, in 1908, before an additional extension gave it its current appearance in 1918.

Run as a farm

The old people’s home was run exclusively on private funding, fundraising initiatives, donations and income from charity bazars for 50 years. The property had a beautiful garden and vegetable plot where potatoes, vegetables, fruit and berries were grown.

They also had hens, pigs and a couple of cows on the property until the 1960s. Luckily, it was no longer being run as a farm when a building on the property containing a smokehouse, byre and barn burned to the ground in 1968.

Helsetunet

Balestrand municipality started allocating funding to the running of the old people’s home in 1970, and once the new Helsetunet building was completed in 1977, the previous old folk’s home was no longer used. Its time as a natural gathering place for the people of Balestrand was thus over, and the Constitution Day procession would no longer be seen in the garden at Sande.

A decade of increasing neglect meant the future of the building was uncertain, until the municipality decided to sell it to private buyers in 1989.