Gunnar Gunnarsson purchased Skriðuklaustur in late 1938. His friend Fritz Höger, a German architect, offered to design a European-style manor house with farm buildings for up to 1500 sheep, horses, cattle, pigs and poultry, as well as storage for machinery and vehicles.

Fritz Höger never visited Iceland. All his local knowledge came from Gunnar himself, and from books. In an article in Der Norden in 1939 he wrote:

“The most important aspect of the farm is a house for Gunnar Gunnarsson, his family, staff and guests. Next are sheds for all the livestock. In addition to this is a triple space for barns, a hay silo, and food stores for humans and beasts, so that all can survive a long winter with 24-hour darkness, without starving. [...] Proud and unpretentious, vigorous and unaffected, it will stand there, a two-storey building, the only one of the farm buildings constructed of huge blocks of basalt withwhite pointing, the windows sturdy,  peaceable and friendly – the roof with broad sheltering eaves, sloping at the same pitch as a real mountain chalet, with turf on the roof. The turf, beautifully green during the short summer, full of flowers like the grassfields all around; and during the winter hibernation, like the grassfield, blanketed in snow. Thin strands of winter grass will then hang down from the roof edge like an old grey beard, with long icicles. And the roofs of all the buildings will be like this, all the same, whether livestock sheds, barns, the estate manager’s house, or storage sheds for sleds, carts, agricultural machinery and a car.”

Gunnar dreamed of large-scale farming at Skriðuklaustur, of the kind he had seen in Denmark. He always had great faith in agriculture, and wished to see more cultivation in the Icelandic countryside. He undertook improvements to the estate at Skriðuklaustur, and was a proponent of founding a cultivation association in the region of Fljótsdalshérað. On the other hand, Gunnar's operations never attained a large scale: he had a maximum of 360 sheep in 1947, along with ten horses, five cows, a few cattle and pigs, and poultry.