Lieutenant Lagerlöf wanted to have Mårbacka not only a productive and well-cared-for farm, but a beautiful place, with stately avenues of approach and extensive gardens of flowers and shrubbery on all sides of the dwelling house.
Not far from the house stood the wretched old cow-barn, with its thatched roof, its small window-openings, and its weather-beaten timber walls. To be sure, there was a row of century-old sycamores, with yellow, lichen-clad trunks and a wealth of foliage, which concealed the building from view, so that the place was perhaps not so very ugly after all. Still, the Lieutenant declared he could never make Mårbacka look like a manor until that cow-house was torn down.
The first few years he had been wholly occupied with the cultivation of the soil, it was not till after the Strömstad visit and the death of Grandmother Lagerlöf that he set about building the new barn, which had to be finished before the old one could be pulled down. That the new barn might not be easily seen from the house, he decided to build it on the level meadow just below the sand-hill, where the other outhouses stood.
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