EMMAS DESIGNBLOGG

Design and style from a Scandinavian perspective

Black and white in the Captain's house

originally built for a sea captain and his family of six, this 90 sqm house from the 1800's in the south of Sweden is now housing Swedish industrial designer Kristina Stark and her family during the summers. This is a nice mix of Marimekko and Ikea, new and old, romantic and modern, cheap and expensive (just look at the kitchen with it's marble workbenches resting on simple homebuilt door-less cabinets) and all over the house there is this continued theme of black contrasting against the white walls and light grey floors.

 

Photo by Anette Åberg for Hus och Hem

Mindre - Interior Stories With a Twist

Interested in seeing pretty and personal Scandinavian spaces? Click over to Mindre (= less or smaller), a Finnish company I found through Tiger. I'm not sure exactly what it is they are doing as there is no "about" page on their site, but I'm guessing they are styling and shooting spaces for magazines... I like the pics though, and I'm sure you will too!

Update! Minna at Mindre emailed me after seeing this post and told me they are a stylist and a photographer who have teamed up to do articles and features for interior magazines. She also told me they are going to put more things up on their website, so I'll be able to show you more later!

 

Hollywood Hills

Loving the lighting in this Hollywood Hills home from The Desk of Lola, so simple!

Colorful Finnish kids room

Among my latest favorite blogs is Pisarapilvi, a Finnish blog with the most beautiful photos of her family home decorated with lots of wonderful Scandinavian design! She just had a baby so her older children's room had to be refurnished a bit, and she posted these photos on her blog when she wanted to sell their old beds. I love this room, and can totally imagine her kids do too!

Happy Weekend!

Happy weekend everyone! I heard it's going to be warm (well relatively, around 10° C) and sunny here this weekend, so I'm hoping to spend most of it outside. I really need some time off from the computer, where I've been spending way too many hours this week trying to start up a big (and so far secret, sorry) project. I'm very excited about this, and I'm hoping to be able to share it with you soon!

I'm leaving you with a picture of a great weekend morning, with a newspaper and a cuppa' on a Piet Hein Eek table and an Eames chair. Looks like a dreamy morning to me! What's your ideal morning like?

Table setting by Lo Bjurulf

Lo Bjurulf is one of my favorite stylists, and now she has joined up with Ikea to make six different table settings for all the parties of the coming spring and summer. The project was inspired by the upcoming crown princess wedding here in Sweden, which everybody is talking about, and princess wedding themed products are popping up all over the place. This however is far more tasteful than most of them. The products are from the normal Ikea ranges, no special stuff here, and no crowns or pics of princesses as far as I can see. Very nice!

This table setting in white with origami decorations is my absolute favorite! Very easy to diy...

For the love of ceramics

A house in Denmark full of vintage ceramics! The ceramic pieces are all Danish and found on fleamarkets around the country, a time consuming hobby for the owners.



Photographer Christian Granquist

Can you help?

I need the source for this picture! Does anyone know who shot it or where it was published?
Thanks Sylwia! She got the answer for me in only 15 minutes. I love my readers!

The picture is from LivingEtc and styled by Claudia Bryant.

Excessing in homestyling

There are a few real estate agents in Sweden specialized in selling extremely styled properties. Not necessarily luxury homes, but staged and propped to look absolutely great. I love browsing these sites, lika Alvhem and Lagerlings, and now my latest find, Bolaget.
Bolaget only works with homes in Malmö, Sweden's third biggest city, a town not famous for being stylish but more for being a melting pot of different cultures, and having the highest crime rate in the country. However, there seems to be some style in Malmö too! All pictures below are from the same apartment, but there are many many more on the site.

I'm curious, do you have estate agents like this in your country too? It would be fun to see what good homestyling looks like in for example The Netherlands, UK, France or Australia!

Happy Weekend!

Enjoy the weekend, wherever you are! I know many of my fellow design bloggers are stuck in Milan right now because of the volcano in Iceland that closed down all the European airports, and although being stuck in Milan doesn't seem too bad at first, when I think about it it can't be fun. I hope you all can go home soon!

I'd like to leave you with this picture, shot by Stellan Herner and styled by Lo Bjurulf for Elle Interiör.
Very clean and calm, which seems to be an unobtainable goal of mine right now. The Spring sun shines merciless through my dirty windows, putting a spotlight on every single cat hair and spot... Yucky! I don't understand how the families in the magazines do it? Do they all have cleaning ladies? Of course I know that the homes are styled, but still... Do you all have spotless homes, or do you too trip over shoes in your hallway and find butter on the fridge handle?

Photographer Marjon Hoogervorst

Dutch photographer Marjon Hoogervorst is probably a well known name for those of you who reads magazines like Elle Decoration, VT Wonen, Elle Wonen or RUM, but for those of you who don't have access to these mags I thought I'd show you some of her work. You can view the rest of her portfolio on vorstin.nl.

 

White office

And now for something completely different! We are still in Copenhagen, but this time in the office of a small communication company called Rhetorica, designed by What We Do, a dynamic design duo consisting of the married couple Hanne and Tobias Scheel Mikkelsen. Hanne is an architect and Tobias is a graphic designer, and together they offer concepting, execution and production planning in a number of visual disciplines like spatial design, product design, small scale architecture, interior decoration, graphic design, webdesign, GUI design, identity design, illustration, information graphics and graphic patterns.

You can read more here on the What We Do blog about this project, what they did and what their thoughts were.

Bohemian modern

Ok, so I'll try to please everyone with this post and see if I succeed. There is the muted color range and design classics you are used to seeing here, but also lots of little vignettes and a quite bohemian feel to it all. What do you think, hit or miss?

This home belongs to Uffe Buchard, one of the driving spirits behind Copenhagen Fashion Week and editor at Danish magazine Dansk. And I had to make an exception here. I never post interior shots with people in them. But look at this guy! I couldn't not post it, right?

Old school

One reader commented the other day that the style here has changed, she thought I had become much to colorful and bohemian... I took a look at what I had posted recently, and realized she was right. I blame Spring! I always tend to go for a bit more color when I've gotten tired of all the greys and whites of winter, and this winter has been extremely long, so perhaps my longing for spring was extra strong this year. I'll try to make it up to her, and everyone else who thinks I've lost my style, within the next few days with a pile of quite minimalist spaces.

This first home is from Sköna Hem, an old school building in the most southern part of Sweden, owned by artist Xenia Edberg Kledzig.


Ps. I found this guide to Amsterdam on LoftLife's site. I think it's great, and it reminded me it's very much time for me to go back there!

Introducing Moop

Today I would like to introduce my latest sponsor, Moop! This is a company that has been around in the blogosphere for as long as I can remember, but to me they still feel very trendy and fresh, and I still covet their bags.
They would make great diaper bags because of all the practical details, like a mass of pockets and waterproof fabrics, and they are definitely stylish enough to use long after my daughter has outgrown that need. I know! Our daughter is 6 months old and we still havent got a diaper bag! It's an outrage, right?! We definitely need one, it's just that we haven't found the perfect one yet. But maybe this is it?
Enough about diapers! The Moop bags are excellent for laptops, iPods, keys, workout clothes and makeup or anything else you want to fit in there too!


All of Moop's bags are handmade in their studio in Pittsburgh, to the highest quality standards, and there is a blog you can check out to see what is going on there and in the lives of the owners of Moop.

If you want a Moop bag, you can buy from their own site, or on Etsy or Supermarket.

The rest of it!

This kitchen...

Ok, I just have to show you this kitchen! Isn't this just one of the best kitchens you have ever seen?! To me it is perfection. The eclectic industrial/retro/country style mix is somehow very harmonious, and makes the space feel relaxedand inviting.
The pictures are from a home for sale in the small Swedish town Eskilstuna, and the rest of the house is pretty awesome too, so check it out here.


Saturday Sweets

I hope you are all having a lovely weekend, and that Spring has arrived where you live. I have to apologize for being absent here for the last couple of days, I've been busy cleaning my house and rearranging furniture, because we had an estate agent over yesterday for a price estimation. You see, this living-in-the-country thing turned out to be not my thing at all. So we are moving, hopefully very soon! We just have to sell the house first, and find a new place closer to Stockholm. I'm browsing the internet for apartments all day long, and it's a lot of fun! I always get the urge to move when Spring arrives, and this year I'm actually going to do it!

To sweeten your weekend, here are a bunch of images from my inspiration files, enjoy!

Photographer Johan Sellén

Swedish photographer Johan Sellén works in both Sweden and China, as you can see in the pictures below. His work is often featured in Swedish magazines, and I think you can see why...

Danes in Sweden

A lot of you seemed to really like the picture of the hallway with the yellow door and sofa, so I thought I would show you the rest of that home today! The house belongs to a Danish couple who moved to Sweden for their love of the Swedish fleamarkets. And of course the lower house prices. The mother of this colorful house also owns a vintage shop in Copenhagen called Affär where she sells the Swedish treasures that don't get to come to live in her house.



Happy Easter!

I hope you all get a lot of rest, good food and fun during the holiday! I'm going to try to catch some sun, and perhaps I'll even start spring cleaning. How about you, what are your plans?

I'll leave you with these photos by Laurie Frankel. They make me think of nicely set tables for dinners with friends, gardening and cleaning, which all seems very appropriate right now with a few days off in front of us.

Pics from Avotakka

Some pics from the Finnish magazine Avotakka, another link I got from Katja.