Bergsmansgård

We are a Dutch couple (66 and 70 years old) and living in Sweden for more than 18 years running our little restaurant. Although the place with houses and garden is very big, the business is very small.
We try to make this place a good place to be for everyone, a place with a heart. We want to give it a future in a world where everything is about money, power and not quality!
Our place is a bit of a paradise (especially for workaholics :-) )
But of course it’s not only wonderful here, it can be cold, there is maybe too much rain, but often we have a wonderful sunny summer, a beautiful coloured autumn or a winter with snow and ice.

Because our place is more or less in the middle of nowhere you can not compare it with a normal restaurant in a village or city.
It is not in a touristic area. Therefore we do not have many tourists or passersby who visit our place. The people who come here are people from the neighbourhood and from far away because of the high quality! Therefore we are not open all year round.
Every season has its own charm and its own things which have to be done:
From Easter till the end of June our restaurant is open every weekend.
In summer (end of June until half of August) and in December we are open much more. Then the main tasks to be done are in the restaurant.
We are not open during Januari, Februari, March untill Easter and not in September, Oktober and the first half of November. Then the tasks are maintenance, dogs and what else have to be done.

We love our place with its peace, quietness, space and nature and we are excited to share all of this with you!

We are in a time of changes: trying to find a new owners because of our age, we feel it is time to retire. Because we sold already the guesthouse and we only have the restaurant we also changed our name to Tolvsbo Värdshus. We however kept the name Bergsmansgård Tolvsbo in this profile to stay recognisable. We have been inviting volunteers to stay with us for many, many years now and we are very enthousiast about the concept. Hundreds of young people have been here! We have mostly 2 to 4 volunteers at a time. In june/august and november/december we have hosted more then 8 helpers at a time! Almost everyone had a wonderful time here, with new experiences. Many friendships were born. Some of them had tears in their eyes when leaving. Some are even returning several times. All of you helped us to become more what we deeply want to be: a place where people can meet other people and where everyone can feel at home. Thank you dear volunteers!! We are very happy with the help of volunteers. We take care of that the working conditions are fitting to a volunteer. We will never ask you to make more hours than you like, we will absolutely try to not give you too much responsibility or stress if you dont like that. But there can be extreme busy moments were we will ask you to do a little more, wich we of course compensate at other moments. Notice that we can be demanding when it comes to deliver our high quality. This quality makes the place special and it makes guests coming back. We are very happy with the young power in muscels and brains to help our old bodies to go on. Everyone has skills and experiences and we preferably want everyone to do what he/she likes most. We can learn of each other and make use of each other’s experience. We try to give you as much learning experiences as possible, a lot of fun and we want to show you how to work with love for the food, how to work with a heart for the guests, the buildings, our 4 dogs and how to work with responsibility for environment and durability. Be welcome at our place! Roswitha and Fridus More detailed info for those who are interested: Roswitha works mainly in the kitchen and restaurant and takes care of all designing and advertising. Fridus is the handyman; he is responsible for the buildings and the facilities. You can help in the garden or with the houses and building- renovating-projects we have to do. We have some lovely dogs (husky like) who love to go on a long walk every day. We hope you will enjoy the nature around us, taking a bicycle, going for a walk, swimming in the lake or paddling in a canoe. But notice that citylife is far away! You will have a room or a caravan on your own and you share the bathroom with other helpers. We have our evening dinner together, the other meals you can take when it fits you best. Our working day rhythm starts mostly late because we often have work to do in the evening also.