Stufvenäs Gästgifveri

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

Where Småland history meets a serious table

The land around Stufvenäs Gästgifveri has been inhabited for some 5,000 years. The main building itself dates to 1798, constructed as guest lodgings for the nearby Värnanäs Manor and positioned just 200 metres from the waters of Kalmar Strait. Original floors, doors, and tiled stoves remain intact inside — a setting that makes the dining room feel genuinely earned rather than staged.

The inn opened in its current form in the spring of 1987 under Sigvard Johansson, who recognised the site's potential and spent decades developing it into a destination. In 2019, CEO Marcus Thell took over, committing to carry the place forward on the same foundations: courage, joy, love, and engagement — values the team states plainly and appears to mean.

The restaurant and its wine

The restaurant serves European cuisine shaped by season and place. Menus adapt to what is available locally, and the kitchen's two quality marks — Made by Stufvenäs for dishes prepared from scratch in-house, and Close by Stufvenäs for carefully selected local produce — signal a kitchen that takes provenance seriously. Organic, locally grown, and fair-trade ingredients appear throughout, and the restaurant has stopped serving bottled water entirely, pouring instead from its own well.

The wine programme is what brought Stufvenäs to international attention. Wine Spectator awarded the cellar its Best of Award of Excellence in 2022 — recognition that reflects years of deliberate rebuilding. In 2007, a burglary stripped the cellar of 6,000 bottles representing 17 years of collecting, a loss now estimated at around SEK 30,000,000. Rather than abandoning the project, the team quietly rebuilt. Today the cellar holds approximately 3,500 bottles across 600 unique labels, and the wine pairing experience is central to what an evening here offers.

Setting and approach

The dining room sits within a well-preserved 18th-century manor house overlooking Kalmar Strait, with views toward Öland on clear days. The surrounding nature reserve — ancient oaks, cormorant colonies on the island of Svartö, protected seal colonies on nearby skerries — gives the location a scale that extends well beyond the table.

The inn is Green Key certified, measuring greenhouse gas emissions annually, sourcing fish with care for the Baltic Sea, and working to reduce food waste across all its kitchens. These are not decorative commitments: the European cuisine served here is directly shaped by what the surrounding region can offer each season.

For guests staying overnight, the 73-room hotel and spa with views of the strait complete a picture of a place that has grown, carefully and over a long time, into something worth the journey to Söderåkra.