The Hand-Embellished Countryside Homes That Helped Define Scandinavian Style

New York Times

20-03-2025

IN 1888, THE Swedish painter Carl Larsson and his wife, Karin, were given a remote log cottage in the village of Sundborn, 140 miles north of Stockholm, by her father. Over three decades, the couple transformed the house, which they named Lilla Hyttnäs, into an elaborate meta-art project, a hand-embellished 14-room home for their eight children. Carl depicted them in more than a hundred Arts and Crafts-inflected watercolors, gamboling amid wildflowers and curled up in Gustavian chairs in rooms painted and stenciled in shades of ocher, crimson and teal. His paintings, which he published reproductions of in books translated into eight languages — 'Ett Hem' ('A Home,' 1899) and 'Das Haus in der Sonne' ('The House in the Sun,' 1909) — helped form Sweden's national identity and imprinted on the world an indelible image of rural Nordic wholesomeness.
Norman Rockwell, to whom Carl is sometimes compared, would later similarly idealize small-town life, but the difference in the two artists' approach is elemental: To make the hyperrealistic oil paintings reproduced on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell, who was born and raised in Manhattan, first photographed models in his studio. Larsson painted from life — his own — though he presented an elaborately constructed version.
Carl died of a stroke in 1919 at age 65 (Karin died nine years later) and, since the 1940s, Lilla Hyttnäs has been maintained by a group of more than 300 descendants, who use parts of the property and open other areas to visitors. During their lifetimes, Carl and Karin also designed two private dwellings nearby to accommodate the overflow of children and guests. Today the residences stand with Lilla Hyttnäs as a homage to the Larssons' vivid aesthetic, which helped pave the way for the patterns of the Finnish textile company Marimekko and the whimsical fabrics of the Austrian-born architect Josef Frank. 'You can see the Larsson houses' influence everywhere,' says the Los Angeles-based writer and interior designer David Netto, citing the eccentric painted hearths and walls at Charleston, the Bloomsbury Group's spiritual headquarters in the English countryside, and the stage-set artificiality of the Italian scenic designer and architect Renzo Mongiardino's exuberant 20th-century interiors. 'Their sensibility springs from the celebration of folk art, obviously — but in service of a psychological mission to design from a place of innocence.'
AS COZILY ANACHRONISTIC as the couple's interiors may now seem, they were designed with revolutionary intent. The Larssons wanted to challenge what they saw as the tedium of the German Lutheran-influenced academic style of upper-class Scandinavia: imposing dark brown wood antique furnishings and excessive neo-Renaissance ornamentation, the sort of surroundings often critiqued in the works of the Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, who was among Carl's closest friends.
They also rejected the traditional hierarchy of living spaces. Influenced by the politically radical British textile designer William Morris and the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who preached the democratization of design and the elevation of the handmade over the mass-produced, they decided there would be no central parlor for entertaining, no grand entrance or servants' wings at Lilla Hyttnäs (or at the other homes they would go on to transform); instead, narrow corridors hung gallery style with framed drawings lead to lofty expanses and clusters of jewel-box rooms. In violation of the bourgeois norms of the time, the couple painted antique furniture with their characteristic disregard for provenance. They relished supersaturated shades — often using several in a single room — on the walls and ceilings, which they also decorated with murals, looping bowers and vines and stanzas of poetry. The children's faces are depicted repeatedly — painted wispily on doors throughout the house or in a quatrefoil on a chimney — floating like Raphael's putti.
The sweetness of such flourishes, however, is cut with Modernism, much of which came from Karin. Also trained as a painter (the couple met at the Scandinavian art colony in Grez-sur-Loing, south of Paris), in her time she was written off as a domestic helpmate. This is perhaps unsurprising, as she spent much of her adult life pregnant and is depicted in many of the paintings wearing ankle-length maternity pinafores that she designed and sewed. But her taste in furnishings, and the fabrics she hand-loomed, embroidered and crocheted, which are everywhere in the houses, provided a disciplined counterpoint to her husband's baroque inclinations. In collaboration with local carpenters, she filled the homes with furniture that blended Nordic folk expression with Japonisme, the Asian-inspired decorative movement that emerged in Europe after Japan was forced to open to the West. Throughout the residences, the couple echoed other design movements, from Bauhaus art and Meiji-era ukiyo-e prints to the Modernist geometry of Dutch de Stijl art, made famous by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg.
The dining room at Lilla Hyttnäs epitomizes the couple's aesthetic, with its intense tomato red and forest green hues. Paneling was traditional in wealthy homes of that era, but they opted for a cheap reed-and-bead variety then mostly relegated to kitchens. For the built-in settee at the head of the table, Karin sewed a seat cushion from a coverlet embroidered by women of the nearby village of Dala-Floda, and a back pillow with sunflowers reaching their tentacle-like petals from four corners into the center of a sapphire blue field. Her 'Four Elements' tapestry hangs above the settee: intense abstract waves of plum, royal blue and tangerine that collide with a Modernist geometric pyramid. The table's white linen runner, embroidered in red thread, depicts an almost hieroglyphic Larsson family tree.
The complex interplay of the couple's tastes, veering from fancifully extravagant to studiously spare, is also evident across the road at Spadarvet, the small early 19th-century farm that they bought in 1897 to provide meat and vegetables for their clan and accommodations for their frequent visitors. Klas Frieberg, a 66-year-old retired engineer and a grandson of Carl's youngest daughter, Kersti, bought out his other family members' ownership of the farm in 1990, raised his family there and remains its steward. In the unassuming entryway, the heavy 18th-century pine door bears ornate 17th-century iron hinges and a birch carving by Axel Frieberg, Kersti's husband, made in 1931. 'These elements came together over a 200-year span in history,' Frieberg says. The walls are painted in variations on a deep grayish green that often appears in the Larssons' interiors and is referred to by Swedes as Carl Larsson green. They are adorned with antique hames (parts of a draft horse's collar) placed by Carl himself, along with a few studies in oil on canvas of horses that he later included in his monumental 1908 painting 'The Entry of King Gustav Vasa Into Stockholm, 1523,' which has dominated the upper staircase of Stockholm's National Museum for more than a century. Separating the hallway from a small sitting room hangs one of Karin's geometric textiles: black and white with a fringed edge. A plastered, rectangular chimney that runs through the middle of the second floor like a pillar remains exactly as the couple painted it in 1897, with a swirling pattern of buttercream and azure and a trompe l'oeil plaque declaring, 'Here are no ghosts' in Swedish.
BY 1906, THE Larssons had acquired yet another home to make into art: a modest eight-room 18th-century house about eight miles from Sundborn in Falun, the largest town in the area, where the children went to school. They began spending their winters there, decamping to Lilla Hyttnäs in the summers. Today the street-side gate door of the Falun house retains a striking six-foot-high totemic wooden relief from Carl's time that — according to its current residents, Björn Henriksson, 80, a former television producer, and his wife, Kajsa — may have been designed by Karin. Although none of the original furniture or wall embellishments have survived, Björn and Kajsa have ensured that the large painting studio Carl added out back, where he made many of his later works, would preserve the couple's sensibility. In the room, now used for family gatherings and small concerts, there is a huge, nubby textile on the wall that Karin might have admired for its Indigenous handwork and scale (Björn brought it home from Pakistan, where he was filming a documentary) and spindle-legged Queen Anne chairs painted green around a large round table draped with fern-colored fringed cloth.
Across the property's small garden remains an important space used by the artist that has been kept intact by the Falun community to honor Carl's legacy: a two-room red accessory cottage. There, while the children were in class, he spent his days creating etchings on a hulking press. That clunky piece of hardware, once a modern marvel, stands quiet now, like the tiny adjoining bedroom, painted ocher, where he sometimes napped on a cot beneath early 19th-century Japanese prints hung along the ceiling line.
On a frigid January evening in 1919, while Karin was with him in the cottage, Carl clutched her arm and said, as she would later recall, 'Karin, I'm dying.' She guided him across the wide-plank pine floor and laid him down on the simple cotton coverlet, a soft beige-and-plum textile that she'd designed with Navajo blankets in mind. It's there still on the narrow bed, caught in a beam of sunlight shining through the high windows.