Last summer, Sibbjäns—the nearly 200-acre regenerative farm and hotel in the south of Gotland, a sun-bleached Swedish island 45 minutes via prop plane from Stockholm—had a soft opening for friends and family. The in-the-works property had been the talk of the island for six years and counting, while the owners, two couples who are Swedish but not Gotlandish (“a local told me it takes seven generations to become a Gotlander,” says Susanna Rönn, one of the owners, who has had a house on Gotland since 1994), set about developing the estate.

Under their stewardship, 18th-century limestone farm buildings were restored with traditional features, such as wooden gutters and dry-laid stone walls, and supporting infrastructure was installed to suit the Mediterranean-like climate, including a rainwater recapture system and irrigation pond, and circulating showers that filter and reuse water in real time. Food on the farm is grown organically, in sight of the hotel and restaurant, and the hotel pool is kept clean with purifying aquatic plants rather than chemicals (it looks like a straight-edged, opaque lagoon). Over the years, the sustainable vision for Sibbjäns became a deepening passion project, and one without an obvious endpoint. By 2025, it felt like the time had come to hang a shingle out and learn on the job.

Back to last June. The tennis court, which is set in a meadow behind a low stone wall built to look like a ruin, wasn’t finished, and neither was the yoga hut, a structure inspired by Gotlandish threshing barns. There was not enough staff to handle the day-to-day churn of the hotel. “We had to bring in all of our friends and family,” says Rönn, “the kids were running around working, one of our friends who’s a lawyer was making the beds. We didn’t know what we were doing yet, but we also loved it and didn’t want to say no to guests.” Her husband, Pontus Rönn, the catch-all fixer at Sibbjäns, describes that summer as “like a real-life Fawlty Towers, and I was Basil Fawlty.”

Then one thing led to another, and the King of Sweden arrived. He came with friends of friends for dinner, a low-key tagalong. As his group walked inside, everybody in the dining room froze, mouths full, presumably trying to reconcile the appearance of the monarch in the under-the-radar barn where the main restaurant operates.

“Sweden is such a small country,” says Susanna Rönn, by way of an explanation. “There isn’t that much separation between people.” Sibbjäns kept mum about the royal visit, but some of the guests who were eating that night did not. Another owner, Kina Zeidler, summed up the aftershocks: “Things were already going well, but then they exploded.” By mid-July, weeks after opening and with roped-in friends still doing turndown, Sibbjäns was fully booked.

Sibbjäns opens officially this month (the hotel currently takes bookings every day from June to August, and periodically during the autumn and spring), and after a year of stress-testing the plumbing, the property has settled into an easygoing, high-summer-house-party groove. The Farmhouse, which is the primary hotel, sleeps 20 people in nine bedrooms, with domestic-feeling common rooms on the ground floor.

There’s a sitting room and a dining room, both with original tiled stoves, vintage Scandinavian furniture, and artwork on loan from the owners, whose neighboring private homes are a bicycle ride away, about five kilometers to the south. A boot room has raincoats and natural rubber wellies for guests to borrow, and the communal kitchen is replete with jars of almond-topped Drömmar cookies and silver dishes of caramels.

Through a courtyard garden and past the restaurant is the long, low-built Bunkhouse, a stylish but more basic category of accommodation with locker room-style shared bathrooms. It has 13 limewashed bedrooms and is intended as an overnight crash pad for guests who come to spend an evening at the restaurant.

Unsurprisingly for a working farm, food production is the business of the day. Wandering through the gardens and greenhouses, you’ll see whiteboards covered in harvest schedules, and staff crouched on their heels, picking produce by hand.

There’s a large, open-air washing station in the middle of the property, near the restaurant, where vegetables and herbs are prepared for the kitchen, and fenced fields adjacent to the hotel buildings; here, around 80 Hånnlamb, or Gotlandic horned sheep, and 30 Mangalitsa pigs roam outside.

But beyond the practicalities of the setting, there’s a broad sense at Sibbjäns that food is how the owners take care of their guests. If you’re planning to bike to the beach in Hoburgen, a coastal region known for its staggering limestone sea stacks, somebody will bundle cinnamon rolls and flasks of coffee into a picnic basket.

Mention you have a sweet tooth, and the chef on the breakfast shift might suggest an off-menu, butter-crisped stack of Swedish pancakes, with homemade jam and cream. Become devoted to the local apple juice, and bottles of it appear in the Farmhouse fridge. You get the idea. If you’re a person generally preoccupied with your next meal, in other words, you and the management will probably see eye to eye.

At the time of writing, there’s still minor work ongoing—the thatched roof of the yoga barn, for example, needs to dry out before it can be installed, and the farm team is weighing up which breed of chickens to add to the livestock—but spiritually Sibbjäns is running at full tilt. With the hotel and restaurant open, the owners have their sights on new projects: stables for horses, an orangery, and a farm shop and bakery, where outside visitors can buy groceries from the estate. “It won’t be fast,” says Rönn, “but our hope is that 200 years from now, what we’re building will still be standing.”