Three Generations, One Hillside
The road to Hotel Laki curves through a landscape that seems to shift in the light—moss-covered lava fields give way to grass-grown slopes, and above it all, the Laki volcanic ridge rises like a guardian watching over the valley. Jón Kristjánsson's family has lived on this particular hillside for seventy years, long enough to understand that the land here speaks a dialect of weather and season that outsiders must learn slowly. When Jón's grandfather first purchased the farm, it was subsistence work: sheep, hay, the occasional tourist who appeared like a surprise gift on an August afternoon. The idea of making hospitality a calling came much later, almost accidentally, as visitors began arriving with more frequency and lingering questions about where to stay.
Jón's mother, Guðrún, was the first to formalize the welcome. She began taking in guests in the 1980s, cooking meals on her own stove for travelers who had driven the Ring Road and felt compelled to venture deeper into the backcountry. What started as a handful of rooms in the farmhouse gradually became a proper establishment, though never at the expense of the place's essential character. Even now, as Hotel Laki operates with the efficiency of a modern business, the building itself remains a working farm structure—old stone walls, corrugated metal additions, the honest architecture of rural Iceland. Jón took over operations in the 2000s, modernizing the plumbing and electrical systems, adding new guest rooms, but insisting on preserving what his mother had built: a hotel that belonged to its landscape rather than imposing itself upon it.
Breakfast is made from scratch every morning—sourdough bread, local cheese, eggs from neighboring farms, fruit preserves that Guðrún still prepares in the kitchen each autumn.
Where Morning Begins
Walk into the dining room before seven o'clock and you will find Jón's wife, Sigríður, already at work. The breakfast buffet at Hotel Laki operates on a philosophy that has become almost radical in its simplicity: everything is made fresh, nothing is purchased from a distant supplier, and the meal is a reflection of what the season and the surrounding farms provide. Sourdough bread emerges from a wood-fired oven that Jón built himself. Local cheese arrives from a producer twenty kilometers away. Eggs come from neighboring flocks—their yolks the color of late-afternoon sun. The fruit preserves, the Icelandic yogurt, the smoked trout: these are choices, not compromises, made daily by people who understand that breakfast is not a transaction but an introduction to the day and the place where that day will unfold.
Guests speak of this breakfast the way travelers speak of singular moments—not merely as nourishment but as an orientation. To eat this food, in this room, while watching the light move across the Laki ridge, is to understand something about why people have chosen to live in the far reaches of Iceland for centuries. This is not luxury hospitality performing itself. This is breakfast in a place where breakfast matters because everything is connected: the farm that provides the eggs, the woman who prepares them, the guest who receives them, the mountain visible through the window. Jón's daughter now works at the hotel during summer months, learning to read the seasons and the needs of guests with the same attentiveness her grandmother and grandfather brought to keeping a household alive on volcanic soil.
Three generations have passed through this kitchen and this hillside, each adding something without erasing what came before. The result is not a hotel that feels designed—it is one that has simply grown, like the grass reclaiming the lava fields, with patience and purpose and the understanding that hospitality, at its best, is simply the generous sharing of a place you know intimately and love.