Østrøm

You really shouldn't leave the Faroe Islands without something local, something made by the hands of the craftspeople and designers who live here. In Tórshavn the widest choice of local labels is at Østrøm.

Hans Juul Hansen, who started the shop, explains the idea like this: the Faroese have long traditions in music and painting, but design sat in the shadows for years and never got the attention it deserved, and talented local makers had nowhere to show what they did.

The shop settled into a historic building that a Swedish entrepreneur by the name of Öström put up in 1887 as a fish factory. The business never took off, and the house changed hands several times. It has been just about everything since then: a factory, a warehouse, a bakery, even a British barracks during the Second World War... Today Østrøm belongs to the Skálkur group of companies and shares the building with the wool brand Sirri and the gear shop Sport 24 Outdoor, and walking and cycling tours of the city set off from the entrance.

The most interesting part is on the second floor, where you'll find work by more than thirty Faroese designers and craftspeople. Wool takes up a lot of room, as you'd expect: sweaters, hats, shawls, blankets, socks and cushion covers made from the wool of Faroese sheep by Shisa Brand, Steinum and Svanhild. They often carry traditional island patterns, which the tailor Hans Marius Debes collected around the villages in 1932 into a book of samples and so saved from oblivion.

The local brand Fosaa sews bags and makes jewellery from Faroese salmon leather, Greenlandic sealskin and Icelandic sheepskin.
Silvursnið works with silver, including jewellery for the Faroese national costume.
Sóljan Glaslist and Mikkalina Glas make the handmade glass, and Leirlist does the ceramics: vases, cups, bowls, plates.
Jórun Høgnesen wraps sea stones in wool and turns them into furniture and decor...
And what surprises you most of all are the wooden art objects and chopping boards by Joel Cole, an American designer who settled in the Faroe Islands, where not a single tree grows. By local standards that counts as a real treasure!

Look for Østrøm in the white building by the yacht harbour in the western bay of Tórshavn. Right next to it sits the largest car park in town, where you can leave your car for eight hours (and then move it). It takes about ten minutes along the water to reach Tinganes, the rocky headland with its old wooden houses under turf roofs, and roughly the same to reach the pedestrian street Niels Finsens gøta with the boutiques of the local brands Guðrun & Guðrun, EINSTAKT and Ullvøruhúsið, the house of woollen goods that belongs to Steinum and Shisa Brand.

Faroese makers are scattered across villages and islands and most of them have no shop of their own, so the widest choice of local labels is right here, at Østrøm.