Why it's called Loft.

The room under the roof

In everyday Norwegian, loftet is the attic, “the storey or room under the roof of a house”, as the Bokmål dictionary puts it. It's where things get put away. In Ibsen's Rosmersholm (1886), a travelling trunk is “fetched down from the loft”, and the language even has a word for the storeroom up there: loftbod.

The house where the farm kept its best things

Long before it meant the attic, loft was the name of a building. Store norske leksikon, the Norwegian encyclopedia, describes it as a two-storey building type that existed in Norway already in the early Middle Ages, with a gallery, the svalgang, in front of or around the upper floor, and a stair outside the house up to it.

The ground floor was a storeroom for food. The upper floor, as a rule, held chests and clothes and was a bedchamber for guests and others. The loft was often the farm's most finely crafted building, “both treasury and best parlour”.

At Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo, the loft from Ose in Setesdal (built around 1700) shows the pattern: food on the ground floor, the farm's best clothes and equipment upstairs, and in summer both floors used as guest rooms and sleeping quarters. The encyclopedia adds that the attic meaning of the word comes from this medieval building.

You can still visit one

Several lofts are preserved in Norway's open-air museums:

• Dagsgardsloftet at Maihaugen in Lillehammer, originally built in 1268 and moved there from Skjåk in 1909.
• Rolstadloftet at Norsk Folkemuseum, from around 1300. It was a sleeping loft, and slots in the walls suggest at least six sleeping places.
• Oseloftet, also at Norsk Folkemuseum, from around 1700.
• Vindlausloftet at Vest-Telemark Museum. Its timber has been dated to just after 1167, which, according to Store norske leksikon, probably makes it Norway's oldest secular wooden building.

Not quite a stabbur

Norwegian farms also have the stabbur, the food store raised on posts to keep mice and rats out, common from the 1700s. The difference is the stair: a loft's stair is outside, up to the gallery, and a bur's is usually inside. In practice the line blurs. Lofts were later raised on posts too: Raulandsloftet from Numedal, now at Norsk Folkemuseum, was lifted onto blocks in the 1700s, and in Nore og Uvdal, where it comes from, people often call the whole building a bur or stabbur.

Air, sky, height

The word goes back to Old Norse lopt, related to luft, “air”. Det Norske Akademis ordbok lists the old meanings as air, sky and height, among others. English got its loft from the same Old Norse word, and aloft from ā lopt, “in the air”.

Why we chose it

Loft keeps your files at home, under your own roof, instead of in someone else's cloud. A loft was where a household kept what it valued, and the word itself has the sky in it. We liked a name that could hold both.