A very small house with a very big view

In October 2026, at a rally in Michigan, somebody called Norway a “shithouse country.” Most countries would have been offended. Norway’s own tourist board replied by posting photos of its most beautiful public toilets.

Down in Mandal, we went one step further. We have an actual shithouse. It has a heart in the door and a view of the sea. It felt rude not to share it.

Mandal is Norway’s southernmost town, a place where the sea has always been the main road. For hundreds of years, sails came and went past these rocks. Norwegian timber went out. Goods and strangers and stories came in, many of them in languages nobody here could understand.

The sea paid well and took back just as much. Fog crept in between the skerries. Storms came out of nowhere. Not every ship that passed this coast made it home, and the wrecks still lie out there.

Between 1807 and 1814 Denmark-Norway was at war with Britain, and the authorities handed out licences to seize enemy ships. The men who took them were called privateers. Basically pirates, but with a permit and a court date.

The southern coast was full of them. Small, fast boats. Heavy guns. Wet boots on slippery decks. Very good money, if you lived.

In September 1809 an American ship came in along this coast. On board was John Quincy Adams, on his way to Russia as America’s envoy. Twenty years later he would become the sixth President of the United States.

The captain feared the boats around them were English ships in disguise, so he took cover in the harbour at Flekkerøy, just outside Kristiansand. There Adams found “about four hundred of our Countrymen.” They were the crews of 36 American ships seized by privateers, all stuck waiting for their trials. He wrote it all down in a letter home.

Did he sail past our outhouse? No. It hadn’t been built yet. It would be another 162 years.

Mandal even has its own secret slang. It’s called Smoi. Traders and locals twisted their words until outsiders couldn’t follow a single sentence. Locals say it came in handy during the German occupation, when the wrong people were listening.

We’d tell you more, but then we’d have to say it in Smoi.

Near the point there’s a place the locals call Blodtappen. Roughly translated: “the blood tap.” Nobody we’ve asked can say exactly where the name comes from. Some talk of an old battle, maybe going all the way back to the Vikings.

We’re filing this one firmly under local legend. We did check the outhouse, though. It’s clean.

After centuries of traders, privateers, storms, wrecks and future presidents, someone finally built what the point had been missing all along.

Four walls. One door. A heart cut into it.

Not a castle. Not a lighthouse. Not a sea captain’s villa. An outhouse.

Built in 1971. Historic since yesterday.

Now it’s your turn to join the story, at modest expense.

Not the land. Not the building. Not a single plank. Just a gloriously official certificate with your name on it, a number that belongs only to you, and a QR code that proves you were part of the most ridiculous chapter yet.

He couldn’t buy Greenland. You can’t buy this either. But you can get the certificate.

Legally worthless. Emotionally priceless.