Sweden’s “most sought after home” was created from Hemnet's big data

What does a Swede's ideal home look like? Sweden’s main housing ad website Hemnet believes they know, and it's thanks to a data-mining strategy that doesn’t rely on polling real estate agents.

As part of a big data experiment, Hemnet analyzed over 200 million clicks on the most popular houses on their site. After crunching the numbers and boiling down trends, Hemnet tasked architecture firm Tham & Videgård to transform that data into the Hemnet House, Sweden’s statistically “most sought after home.”

The Hemnet House is an innovative example of data-driven design that’s appropriately nicknamed the “House of Clicks” for the crowdsourced process that determined the building’s many characteristics, from the size of the home to the price. Hemet collected visitor website data between January and October 2014 and analyzed the most-clicked properties, longest-viewed images, and other data points. Those statistics were integrated into a final design that blended two iconic Swedish housing styles: the historic red wooden cottage with the white modern house representing industrial development and international ideas. The Hemnet House combines “the rationality of the functionalistic box combined with the quality of craftmanship and material presence of the Falu red cottage,” says Tham & Videgård.

Painted in Sweden’s traditional Falu red, the 120-square-meter boxy home is clad in wave-shaped timber panels. The contemporary interior is filled with natural light and white walls. The largest room in the house is the double-height kitchen—data indicated that spacious open plan kitchens were a favorite among Swedes. The kitchen connects to the ground level dining room and sits adjacent to a stairway that leads up to the master bedroom. An outdoor terrace offers access to the outdoors while maintaining privacy. The house is priced at 2,774,021 Swedish Kroner (~ US$332,458).