Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit have spent years trying to turn a modest island cabin into a showcase of Norwegian design — an ambitious renovation that stalled just as it was about to break ground. Now a storm named Amy has done what years of royal scandal couldn't: it forced their hands. The tempest tore apart one of the docks on Flatholmen, the tiny island the couple has owned since 2008. The damage has produced the first real building permit the property has seen in years — not for the glass-and-timber dream house long promised, but for a humble pier.
© Getty ImagesAccording to Norwegian outlet TV2, the municipality of Risør has cleared the crown prince and princess to rebuild the storm-wrecked dock. It's a modest approval, capped at six square meters, but it matters; without a working dock, the island is barely reachable, and any future revival of the couple's long-shelved architectural project would need one regardless.
The permit came with a catch. A companion request — for a seaside platform of the kind common along Norway's coast — was withdrawn after the state administrator recommended against it. The dock itself only cleared because of an unusual technicality: one of Flatholmen's existing moorings is used by police, which let the municipality authorize a second access point without setting a precedent for other landowners. Haakon and Mette-Marit will cover both the construction and the roughly $575 in municipal fees themselves. Notably, the original dock — built sometime between 1982 and 2004 — never had a formal permit at all, so this approval is being processed as new construction from scratch.
A vision by Snøhetta, frozen since 2022
© NTB Scanpix/AFP via Getty ImagesThe dock is a footnote to the real story: a lavish architectural transformation that has sat dormant for years. The royal couple paid close to a million euros for Flatholmen in 2008, acquiring a modest 1960s hytte — the traditional Norwegian cabin — on the isolated island within the Risør archipelago. For years it served as a low-key family retreat, occasionally rented out to tourists and the backdrop for the odd relaxed family photo.
The ambition, though, was much bigger. The couple commissioned Snøhetta, the celebrated Norwegian architecture firm, to demolish the old cabin entirely and replace it with a contemporary 120-square-meter home: multiple levels, a weathered wood facade, solar-ready roofing, and an outdoor deck designed to double as space for art installations. Permits for the full build came through in 2022.
Then everything stopped.
Scandal, illness, and a project nobody could defend
© UK Press via Getty ImagesThe pause wasn't a construction delay — it was optics. The approval landed just as the crown couple's public standing was cratering: Mette-Marit's son, Marius Borg, was facing trial, and the princess's past correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein was drawing intense scrutiny. The palace's response was blunt. Building the cabin, it said at the time, "is not a priority." No wall was ever raised, and the permit was allowed to lapse.
The past year only piled on more reasons to leave it alone. Mette-Marit's chronic lung condition worsened to the point of requiring a transplant, from which she's still recovering. The Epstein story kept generating headlines. And Marius Borg was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison. Against that backdrop, some Norwegian media outlets took to describing the shelved Flatholmen project as little more than "beach luxury" — hard to justify while the royal house was absorbing one blow after another.
A small sign of life
© GTRESNone of that has changed with this dock approval — the Snøhetta house itself remains unbuilt, and its permits are no longer valid. But the go-ahead does confirm something: Flatholmen hasn't been abandoned. The crown prince and princess are still quietly maintaining the island, even as the palace continues to insist the flagship project "is not a priority."
For now, that's the extent of it — a rebuilt pier on a wild, beach-lined island in southern Norway, and a dream house still waiting for the moment when the family's institutional and personal storms finally pass.
