One hundred years in stone
A family house, kept in the family
Pine Hill was built around a century ago, the way houses were built here then — thick stone walls, wooden beams, a roof of red tiles, and a dry-stone wall around the garden. It has stayed in our family ever since.
I grew up with this house. The summers of my childhood happened in this garden, and the older stone building across the lawn still stands the way it always has. When we opened the house to guests, the idea was simple: change as little as possible, and share what we love about it.
— Josip, your host
What this place carries
Every family in Lika has a story written into a house like this one. Ours is a story of generations who worked this land, left for cities and other countries, and kept coming back — because summers belonged to the garden, to the long table, and to the quiet under the pines.
Restoring the house, we kept what the builders left us: the stone walls, the beams, the proportions of the old rooms. The furniture is a mix of what the family used and what the house asked for. Nothing here is staged — the toys in the children's room, the tools in the garden house, the archery target on the lawn all belong to a house that is lived in, not displayed.
Guests often tell us the house feels like their grandmother's place, wherever their grandmother happened to live. That is the heritage we try to keep: not a museum of Lika, but the feeling of arriving somewhere your family has been expected.
Then and now
Gračac, a small town in the Lika highlands
Gračac sits in a karst valley between the Velebit and Resnik mountains, halfway between the coast at Zadar and the lakes of Plitvice. It is a quiet town of the Lika region — shops, a bakery, a railway station, and streets that empty early in the evening.
The house stands at the edge of town, where the lane turns to gravel and the forest begins. From the garden you hear birds, wind in the pines, and not much else.
Forest at the doorstep, mountains on the horizon
Behind Gračac rises Crnopac, the wild southern ridge of Velebit — karst towers and beech forest laced with marked trails. Fifteen minutes away, the Cerovačke caves run deep under the mountain. Half an hour south, the Zrmanja carves its green canyon toward the sea.
We keep a longer list of walks, swims and day trips in the Journal, and the attractions and activities sections have the essentials.
Come and see it yourself
The whole house, from €110 per night, minimum three nights.