Petersborggata 9-16

Engenstykket, an area just southwest of Tromsø city centre, has a residential development built for the middle classes with what at the time was a high density. The land originally belonged to Tromsøysund Vicarage, but was in 1919 sold as series of leaseholds

many bought by the master builder Olaf Sørem who went on to finance and build several houses before selling them on. He thereby became one of Tromsø's early residential property developers as we know the term today. Other plots were purchased directly by the future occupiers who hired their own builders.

The eight white houses in this part of Petersborggata are all placed in the middle of their plot surrounded by their own garden. All were built within a period of five years and have much in common as well as having individual characteristics. The style is a mixture of jugend (Northern European art nouveau) and Swiss chalet style. Most of them originally had a simple footprint based on the internal load bearing walls forming a cross. Such houses were popularly called "byggmesterhus" (master builder houses) as it was a structure well mastered by most master builders.

The houses typically have a more or less square footprint split into four rooms with a central chimneystack. They are all built in sawn tongue and grooved logs and have wooden external cladding, which is now painted white, though they did originally have different colours. The ground floors have generous ceiling heights and under the steep roofs there are spacious upstairs rooms. The houses have many details such as balconies, dormers, verandahs, windows and purely decorative elements in common but again with individual variations. Originally all the roofs were slate roofs, but now some have been replaced with other materials.