Where did Fridtjof Nansen grow up and live?

📍Polhøgda, 1327 Lysaker, Bærum, Norway

1901 – 1930

“I built Polhøgda — the High Meadow — on the Lysaker fjord outside Oslo in 1901, and it was my home for the rest of my life. I had returned from the Fram expedition across the Arctic Ocean and was the most famous man in Norway, and Polhøgda gave me the base from which I moved between science and diplomacy and humanitarian work. The house overlooked the fjord and the islands, and I worked in a study filled with Arctic charts and expedition equipment. After my wife Eva died in 1907 I lived there alone with my children, and the fjord and the forest sustained me through grief and through the later work — the League of Nations, the Nansen passport for stateless refugees, the famine relief in Russia. The Norwegian landscape was always the ground beneath whatever I was doing.”

👍 LovedThe Norwegian fjord landscape — its clarity and scale and the way it puts human concerns in proportion. The study with its Arctic charts. The sense of a life that moved between physical adventure and moral commitment.

👎 DislikedEva's death in 1907, which left the house with a different quality. The frustration of League of Nations work against national self-interest. The knowledge that the Nansen passport, for all it helped, could not address the causes of statelessness.

Map showing where Fridtjof Nansen lived — Polhøgda, 1327 Lysaker, Bærum, Norway

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Fridtjof Nansen's home at Polhøgda, 1327 Lysaker, Bærum, Norway

📍 Street view today

Sources: Huntford, R. Nansen: The Explorer as Hero (1997), Duckworth; Nansen, F. Farthest North (1897), Archibald Constable