Sleep Inside Ex Machina: Norway’s Juvet Landscape Hotel

If you have seen Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s slow-burn 2014 thriller about a reclusive tech billionaire and his unnervingly lifelike AI, you remember the house. Glass walls opening onto raw rock and rushing water, rooms that seem carved into the hillside, a forest pressing in on every side. Here is the good news. That house is not a set. Most of it is the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Valldal, in northwestern Norway, and you can book a night there right now.

The Real Architecture Behind Nathan’s Lair

Juvet was designed by the Oslo firm Jensen & Skodvin, who scattered a handful of small freestanding rooms through a steep river valley rather than building one big lodge. Each cube rests lightly on steel rods, and each has at least one wall of floor-to-ceiling glass aimed at its own private slice of gorge, birch forest, or mountain. Nothing inside competes with the view. The film’s production borrowed the hotel’s interiors and walkways for Nathan’s research retreat, blending them with a private residence nearby, and the location work was so seamless that Vanity Fair devoted a whole story to untangling it.

It is a rare case where a movie’s architecture is doing real storytelling. The film needed a place where genius, isolation, and nature could sit in the same frame, and Norway simply already had it.

Staying at the Juvet Landscape Hotel

A decade after the movie made it famous, Juvet is still family-run, still deliberately small, and still operating year round. The property now offers its signature landscape rooms along with two tiny birdhouse rooms and an old writer’s cottage, plus a spa hidden by the river and meals served in a converted barn. In 2025 the hotel picked up a Michelin Key, the hotel world’s answer to the Michelin star. When we first wrote about it, a night cost about 1,550 kroner. Prices have climbed since, as fame tends to ensure, but a stay here still buys something almost no luxury hotel can offer, which is total immersion in a Norwegian valley with nothing between you and the river but glass.

Valldal itself is a fine base for the fjord country nearby, with the Trollstigen mountain road and the Geiranger fjord within striking distance. It is the kind of place we had in mind when we started collecting the most beautiful places on Earth. For more design-minded escapes, wander through our travel section.