Ask someone abroad to describe a Scandinavian home and you usually get the same picture: white walls, pale wood, one lonely plant. We live here. The picture is wrong. We are a wallpaper studio in Stockholm, our patterns are drawn here and printed in Ulricehamn, and this first guide in the Journal is about what Scandinavian wallpaper actually means, seen from the inside.
Not white walls
White is what travelled. It photographs well and it fits in a suitcase. What stayed home looks different: Swedish homes hold colour, pattern, and a lot of care. The rest of this guide is about where that care comes from.
The light is soft, not grey
People imagine darkness. They are missing the best part. From spring to autumn the light here is fantastic, and above all it is long. The sun goes down and the light stays, for hours on a good evening, leaving at a slant instead of dropping. In the Mediterranean the sun is harsh all day and then it is dark, at once. Here the day ends slowly, in pastels.
That softness sits in more than the sky. It is in how people speak to each other, careful of feelings, sometimes too careful. And it got into our palettes. Whispering Beige, Northern Rose, Soft Mandarin. Pastel names for pastel colours, mixed for rooms where the evening takes its time.
And still, real colour
Sweden is not all pastel. Forest Green, Lapis Blue, Warm Terracotta sit in the same collection and they do not whisper. That fits too. People here tend to be quiet on the surface and stubborn underneath, patient the way you have to be at this latitude. The strong colourways are that side of the place. A Lapis blue wall in February is not an accident. It is a decision, made in advance, by someone who knew February was coming.
Cosy is preparation, not decoration
The light is soft. The weather is not. From late autumn a large part of life moves indoors and stays there for months, which is why the interior culture here runs so deep. You furnish a Swedish home the way other countries pack for a journey: seriously, in advance, because you will be living with your choices through the whole winter. A wall you like earns its keep many times over. This is also why we print wallpaper and not parasols.
Mostly nature
Sweden has about 25 people per square kilometre. Most Scandinavian square metres are forest, water and open land, so nature is not the weekend excursion, it is the default view. Our patterns are drawn from it. Karolina begins from photographs: a flower, the carving on an old facade, the small marine plants along the shore on Gotland. Between the photograph and a finished repeat lie dozens of pencil studies, the same leaf redrawn with an angle shifted a few degrees, until the pattern tiles with no visible seam. Her test for a finished pattern is that it should look as though it grew, not as though it was planned.
Soft shapes, quiet ambition
If there is a common thread in Scandinavian design it is this: soft shapes, honest materials, and an ambition that does not raise its voice. The idea is a room that lifts your day a little without demanding credit for it. Our wallpapers are surface printed, what Swedes call limtryck, a method two centuries old where each colour is a water-based paint, thick as distemper, carried onto the paper by its own engraved roller. The paint sits on the surface with a slight relief you can find with a fingertip. The workshop is Ulricehamns Tapetfabrik, the Swedish factory that also prints Svenskt Tenn's Josef Frank wallpapers. The non-woven base is FSC certified, the finished paper is tested to OEKO-TEX Standard 100, and everything is printed and packed in Sweden, down to the paperboard it ships in. More about the printing on the making.
The five patterns
Fröviva · an organic flower set against a strict grid of standing diamonds. The most architectural of the five. Three colourways.
Krokus · crocuses drawn small and dense, as if they grew on a tree. The repeat is 26.5 cm, the smallest in the range together with Fröviva. Four colourways.
Serpentin · climbing branches and leaves, with small berries added for a little tension. Karolina says it more or less grew by itself. Four colourways.
Citrus · a lemon grove, drawn after watching lemon trees climb a garden wall in Florence. Lush, but with air in it. Three colourways.
Frodas · imagined flowers, drawn loose and layered like a spring bouquet, with the leaves grown in around them after. Two colourways.
Start with a piece of the real thing
Photographs, including ours, only carry a wallpaper so far. A sample is a piece of the real wallpaper, roughly A4, cut from the same roll and printed on the same paper. It costs 50 kr, reaches your mailbox in a few days, and the cost comes off your first roll. Tape it to the wall you have in mind. Look at it in the morning, and again in the long evening light. It will make sense by then.
Rolls are made to order and dispatch within two weeks, printed in Ulricehamn on the same rollers as always.
