Höfði House

About Höfði House

Höfði House is a white timber house on the Reykjavík waterfront where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in October 1986 and came close to a deal on cutting their nuclear arsenals. That meeting is widely seen as the beginning of the end of the Cold War, and inside, the flags of the United States and the Soviet Union still hang crossed to mark it.

The building is older than the summit by almost 80 years. It was designed in Norway, shipped to Iceland and put up at Félagstún in 1909 for the French consul, Jean-Paul Brillouin, whose name and the year are lettered in gold on a door inside. The poet and entrepreneur Einar Benediktsson lived here next.

From 1938 until the end of World War II, Höfði was the British consulate, a period when both Winston Churchill and Marlene Dietrich visited. Reykjavík bought the house in 1958, restored it, and has used it for official receptions since 1967.

In August 1991, Iceland signed its recognition of the restored independence of the Baltic states here. A fire on the house's 100th birthday in 2009 damaged the building but spared its irreplaceable contents, and because Höfði is still a working reception house, most visitors see it from the outside.

That makes this a short stop, 15 to 30 minutes on the lawn reading the plaques and looking out over the bay toward Mount Esja. It sits on the shore path about a 10-minute walk east of the Sun Voyager sculpture, and the statue of Einar Benediktsson by Ásmundur Sveinsson stands close by. There's no charge and the grounds are open all year, so it fits easily into a walk between the harbor and Laugardalur.