Furulund was where Sulitjelma Aktiebolag housed the people who gave orders. The villa stood there with its verandas and its garden trees, photographed in the 1920s looking every inch a bourgeois home in a landscape that offered nothing bourgeois at all. A few hundred metres away, miners slept as many as sixteen to a room. Families with quarters of their own were required to board unmarried workers and feed them from the same kitchen. The company owned the houses, the shop, the road and the transport, and the labour organiser Martin Tranmæl called the place a small tsardom where capital ruled unchecked. You can read the entire social structure of Sulitjelma in the distance between the director's veranda and the barracks — which is, incidentally, why the villa is now the most interesting building in the village to walk into.

The mines wound down slowly and then all at once. Copper prices collapsed in 1975, the state took the operation over in 1983, and in 1982 — with the industry visibly failing — the old director's residence was converted into a hotel with fifty beds. A renovation and extension in 1993 brought capacity to around sixty. It was an act of optimism in a village whose only employer would shut for good in 1991, and optimism did not immediately pay: the hotel ran at a deficit and closed before the Skagen Hotel group took it over in 2001, reopened it with a spa department, and finally made the numbers work. A copper town without copper had to sell something. It turned out to have glaciers, a mining museum, and a mine you can ride a locomotive into.

In early summer 2015 the hotel went up for sale, and that autumn came the announcement that it would be used as a reception centre for people fleeing the war in Syria. The proposal drew a loud local debate — the figure discussed was around 150 arrivals in a settlement of roughly 450 people, and plenty of residents said plainly that the number was too high for a village that size. In December 2016 the property was bought by the Nordnorsk Reception Center, which told Norwegian media it intended to run asylum reception on the site. There is a symmetry in it that is hard to miss. A house built to shelter the single most powerful man in a company hierarchy was proposed, a century later, as shelter for families who had lost everything they owned.

In autumn 2019 the building changed hands once more, bought by Salten Hotell AS with the intention of putting guests back in the rooms, and hotel operations resumed in early 2020. It runs today as Sulitjelma Hotell with somewhere in the region of fifty rooms, a restaurant and bar, and a steady trade in conferences, weddings and birthdays — the kind of business that makes a hotel part of a community rather than a stop on a road. Guests arrive for the Sulitjelma mining museum at Fagerli, for the visitor mine at Grunnstollen where the temperature holds at six to eight degrees year-round, for the Blåmannsisen and Sulitjelma glaciers, and for the southern end of the 800-kilometre Nordkalottruta trail. Some of them sleep in what were once the director's rooms without ever learning that the walls around them were nailed together twice, on two different fjords, more than a century apart.