For interior designer Marie-Louise Sjögren and her husband Mikael, the idea of buying a house on Stockholm’s archipelago came about on an early morning skinny dip in summer 2018. The couple, who live mainly in Stockholm with their three young children, were considering a holiday home in the South of France. But when they visited Mikael’s father’s island summer house, they had a change of heart. ‘We suddenly realised that what we were looking for existed so much closer to home,’ recalls Marie-Louise. ‘It is just so calm and quiet, and it made much more sense to have somewhere just an hour by boat from our flat.’
With their attention on the 30,000-plus islands that make up Stockholm’s archipelago, they quickly stumbled, rather amazingly, upon the ideal house – in fact, the first they saw – on a small island 28 miles north east of Stockholm. Perched above the sea on the southern side of the island, it was built in 1917 as a gift from a man to his wife. ‘It’s unusual in that the ceilings are really high,’ explains Marie-Louise of the two-storey building. ‘Apparently, his wife wasn’t all that keen on the countryside, so this was very much a house designed with the city’s architecture in mind.’
For the previous owners – a family who cherished it as a summer house – its rustic charm was part of its appeal, but Marie-Louise, who had recently renovated their Stockholm flat and was gearing up to launch her eponymous interior design studio, was under no illusions how much work would be needed. ‘Wallpaper was hanging off the walls, the ceilings were damaged and all the decoration was tired,’ she recalls. The exterior was no exception: though built from timber, it had been fitted with a red metal cover in the Sixties, which had kept it watertight but was aesthetically incongruous.
The initial focus was sorting out the inside. Marie-Louise wanted to make sure the house could be used all year round, so heating had to be introduced to supplement four beautiful traditional kakelugn stoves, which are original to the house and provide warmth in two sitting rooms and two of the bedrooms. ‘The house had never been used in this way before,’ says Marie-Louise, who called on Stockholm-based architect and heritage consultant Paul Wilund of Wilund Arkitekter & Antikvarier to help her rework the space. ‘I wanted it to feel fresh, but didn’t want to lose its original spirit,’ she explains.
