Swedish-Style Balanced Aesthetic Interior Design

Carl and Karin had received the cottage from her father Adolf Bergöö in 1888. The structure dated to 1837. They called it Lilla Hyttnäs and spent the next twenty-four years adding onto it. Karin directed the carpenters. Carl painted the interiors. By the time they moved there permanently in 1901 they had eight children and strong opinions about domestic space.

Carl published a book in 1899. It contained twenty-four watercolors of their home. He titled it Ett hem, which means a home. The book was supposed to inspire readers to decorate their own houses. It sold well. Tourists started showing up at Sundborn while the family was still living there. The children gave tours.

Svenskt Tenn

Estrid Ericson opened a pewter shop at Smålandsgatan 40 in Stockholm in October 1924. She had been working with a metalsmith named Nils Fougstedt since that summer. The shop was called Svenskt Tenn, which means Swedish pewter. Ericson stood behind the counter when she was not in the workshop making objects. A newspaper noted that this was unusual. The business won a gold medal at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925.

By the early 1930s Ericson had moved into furniture. She hired the Swedish functionalist architects Uno Åhrén and Björn Trägårdh to design pieces. She fired Bruno Mathsson after a disagreement. She began corresponding with Josef Frank.

Frank was Austrian. He had trained at the Vienna University of Technology from 1903 to 1908 and helped start the Viennese Modernist movement. He was also Jewish. His wife Anna was Swedish. They left Austria in 1933 because of antisemitism and intended to return when things improved. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. Frank lost his citizenship. The Swedish politician Malte Jacobsson and the poet Anders Österling lobbied for him to receive Swedish citizenship. He got it in 1939.

Ericson had seen Frank's furniture at an exhibition in 1921. She hired him in January 1934. He was forty-eight years old. He disliked Le Corbusier's idea of the house as a machine. He worried that identical interiors would produce identical people. His designs for Svenskt Tenn used botanical patterns in bright colors. He mixed mahogany with bamboo. He wrote that it did not matter if you combined old furniture with new, clashing prints with solid colors. "Things that you love will nevertheless fuse into a harmonious entity."

They exhibited at the Paris world exposition in 1937 and the New York world exposition in 1939. Critics started calling what they made "Swedish Modern." The label stuck. Prince Eugen of Sweden said Frank's textiles were better than William Morris's.

Frank fled to Manhattan when Germany occupied Denmark and Norway in 1940. He taught at the New School for Social Research and designed textile patterns. He returned to Sweden after the war. He kept working with Ericson until he died in 1967. He made more than two thousand designs.

Ericson sold Svenskt Tenn to the Kjell and Märta Beijer Foundation in 1975. She was eighty-one. She stayed on as managing director. The foundation has since donated around 300 million kronor to research in ecology, medicine, and other fields. In 2022 the auction house Bukowskis sold Frank's "Apskåpet" cabinet for 4.625 million kronor. That was the highest price ever paid for a piece of Swedish twentieth-century furniture.

Bruno Mathsson

Bruno Mathsson grew up in Värnamo in Småland province. His father Karl was a master cabinet maker. His grandfather had been a cabinet maker. His great-grandfather had been a cabinet maker. Bruno left school early and went to work in the shop.

He started experimenting with bentwood in the 1920s. In 1929 he began borrowing books and magazines from the Röhsska Arts and Crafts Museum in Gothenburg. Big boxes arrived by train. The museum curator Gustaf Munthe became an important contact. Mathsson designed a chair in 1931 for Värnamo Hospital. The frame was bentwood. The seat was woven hemp webbing. He called it the Grasshopper. Swedish furniture manufacturers rejected it.

His breakthrough came at an exhibition at Röhsska in 1936. A year later his bed won the Grand Prix at the Paris Expo. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., who ran the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ordered chairs for the museum's new building. The building opened in 1939.

Gotthard Johansson was the leading cultural commentator at the Swedish Crafts Association. He visited the Museum of Modern Art and saw Mathsson's furniture there. He wrote about it in Svenska Dagbladet on May 11, 1940. "For the first time in my life I felt a secret pride in being born only twenty kilometers from Värnamo."

Lagom

The Swedish word lagom gets used in almost every discussion of domestic interiors. It is usually translated as "not too much, not too little." The etymology is disputed. One theory traces it to the Old Norse phrase laget om, meaning around the group, a reference to passing mead so everyone got enough.

The Swedish furniture industry employs roughly 30,000 people. Annual sales are around 2.6 billion euros. Most of that goes to the European Union, Norway, and the United States. The Swedish housing market dropped about 25 percent in 2024. Furniture sales held relatively steady. Cecilia Ask Engström at the trade organization TMF says Swedish manufacturers adopted circular production methods earlier than competitors.

Not all Swedish designers accept lagom as a guiding principle. Gustaf Westman is a Stockholm-based designer in his thirties. His Chunky Cup was designed to prevent spillage at cocktail parties. His Curvy Mirror has a waitlist of more than two thousand names. He released a studded version of the cup called the Spiky Chunky Cup at Stockholm Design Week in 2024. "While Scandinavians love all things sleek," he said, "I don't limit myself to muted palettes or safe shapes."

Liza Laserow Berglund co-founded the rug company Nordic Knots. She says customers are asking for more color. "The perception of typical Scandinavian design has always been about neutrals—blacks, whites, beiges and greys. We have seen a move away from that."

Ett Hem

Ilse Crawford launched British Elle Decoration in 1989. She was twenty-seven. She pushed to include photographs with people in them and rooms that looked messy. She left the magazine in 1998. She worked for Donna Karan in New York. She found it too corporate. She started Studioilse in 2003.

Her projects include Shoreditch House in London, the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, and a furniture collection for IKEA called Sinnerlig. She told The New York Times that when she designs spaces she thinks about how they feel rather than how they look. "The primal perspective," she called it. "The thing that touches you."

Mix bought two neighboring buildings and expanded to twenty-two rooms in 2022. She added three long-stay apartments and a gym. Crawford remained involved. There are plans to open properties in Tuscany and the Swedish countryside.

The hotel uses Gotland stone, oak, and sheepskin. Some rooms have fireplaces. The courtyard garden is planted in whites and soft blues. Staff light candles throughout the building in winter. Crawford teaches at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Her department is called Man and Wellbeing.

Stockholm Design Week 2025

The Stockholm Furniture Fair ran from February 4 to 8, 2025 at Stockholmsmässan. Around 250 exhibitors from twenty countries participated. The theme was "Connecting the Dots."