Community Highlight: Bjorn Rieder

Our community is an integral part of the success of our company. HAVN’s vision and vitality are brought to life with the support from our community members helping us work towards achieving this dream. It is our pleasure to highlight some of our members, to showcase their incredible talents, hard work, and creativity in our weekly segments.

Bjorn Rieder is one of HAVN’s lead carpenters. He and his crew are taking on challenging and unique tasks and figuring out how to do them effectively and beautifully.⁠

Bjorn has had many artistic and natural skills since his youth, including the development of passion projects, the creation of unique artwork, and the mastery of carpentry. He is a fun, talented, gracefully empathic, and friendly individual. It's an immense pleasure to have him here on board. 

Q: Is there anything specific about this project that you're really excited about or something new that you've been working on, that you haven't had a chance before?

Before this project, I had been doing carpentry for a while and I had built some really beautiful saunas. Nick saw my work and then contacted me about his HAVN project idea and asked what I thought about it. I said, “I think that’s crazy, let’s do it!”. It is just one of those far-out interesting projects that you don’t get to do very often and you’d be crazy to pass up.

Q: Did you think the HAVN project was going to get approved?

I think that the HAVN project would never have had a better chance to be approved than now. The climate is changing. Young and creative people like myself want to live in a beautiful city like Victoria and be able to work on progressive and interesting projects. Everyone talks about cities like Montreal, New York, and Paris, but why can’t we do far-out, cool stuff in Victoria? And now we are.

Q: Do you have any side passion projects that you're really into or that you've been working on, or is there anything you'd like to start in the future?

I love building spartan-inspired festival costumes, essentially like armour for ravers. It’s really fun to build costumes, especially for men because women definitely have more costume opportunities and selections and I always thought “wow, I want to dress in something exciting as well!” I started this passion around Halloween of 2010, where I just taught myself how to chain mail which is almost like knitting with metal. It is a ridiculously time-consuming process but I thought “this is great”, I can hyper-focus and not talk to anyone for hours and just simply build this beautiful piece of clothing that you can wear to a wonderful event. Now I take these costumes to Burning Man and lots of other festivals. 

Q: What are a few things you love about working on the west coast or just love about being here on the west coast in general?

First of all, I love the weather. The weather is amazing. You can be doing a construction project like this in the middle of January, which is usually the worst month of the year, and the weather is pretty good most days, it’s great! I also love the nature here, the beautiful mountains, the ocean. It smells nice, and the water is clear and perfect. It’s amazing that you could be skiing at one time, and shortly after you could be surfing. My family is Norwegian and I find the BC coast is very similar to Norway so we just feel at home here. The people here in Victoria are also great. There is sort of that unique, progressive, hippie vibe in the city which I like, and everything is a bit slower. It’s not as crazy as say Toronto. It is definitely getting faster-paced around here though which is also exciting. 

Q: What are some fun facts about you or things enjoy doing?

I love learning to build new things I’ve never built before. I think my perfect life would just be learning how to build things which is why I love this job so much. I really like my friends. Friends are really important to me and I spend a lot of time socializing. I really love music. Music is a huge part of my life, I love playing music, listening to it, and dancing as well. I am a huge fan of dancing, I took ballroom dance classes for eight years when I was a teenager and into my early 20s

I went to Waldorf school which is an artistic school where they really encourage you to follow your natural passions and talents. The structure and curriculum is a lot looser and freer. They were like “hey you like to build stuff? Get really good at that”. One of the best parts about that school was all the friendships I made there and many of them are still really close family friends and they are all off doing really exciting projects and careers as well. A big part of being able to be successful in a project like this are the skills I learned from Waldorf school is teaching you how to problem solve and “if you have challenges? You figure it out. And you can have fun while doing it!”

Q: Is there anything else you want to add or mention about yourself or the project?

Overall, I think we are just having a great time, this is where we need to be and what we need to do.

Follow us on Instagram if you want to see more photos of Bjorn, the construction progress, and other HAVN content. Stay tuned for more HAVN community highlight features to come! We hope you enjoyed :)