Day 6 - Betsy in Stockholm - Ett Hem Hotel

Designed by Ilse Crawford in 2012 built in 1910 for a government official as his home.

This hotel is so amazing I am going to blog it room by room. Starting with the room I am staying in. It is the most spectacular hotel room I have ever been in. I have stayed in luxury hotels before, but this isn’t luxury this is intimate and detailed in ways American hotels cant be.

This is the best hotel room I have every been in. I will do my best to share this experience. 

My Room-

I have a junior suite. There are few rooms in the hotel- about 13.

This room is a comer room with a terrace and separate tub shower and toilet area.
The room has a historic Swedish Stove (Fireplace) in the blue and white design of showing green keys, swags and and flora. The stove is historic and has brass fixtures and a brass flat hearth.

The room has custom laid white oak floors in a chevron pattern with walnut inlay details. The walls are painted a soft gray green that I changes color throughout the day. My Nobis hotel room was the same color.
The drapery is natural flax colored linen and some silk drapery too.

The rugs are silk and sheepskin. The mix of eclectic worn furniture feels like you are in someone’s home. The sofa is worn leather, the wood side chair and wood stools add a natural tough. The occasional table is gray lacquer and the bed and headboard are brown mohair.

The lighting is very low and layered. It’s dark here at 3pm!! So the lighting is very important. The only overhead light is the antique crystal chandelier and some down lights in the entry foyer closet area and the bathroom.

There are lamps and candles all over. Candles! With matches! This could never happen in the states. There are 3 paintings in the room and the many books, trays, plants and vases. There are is about 30 accessories in the room not counting pillows, lamps or rugs. This is what is making the difference. You can spend a day just discovering your room. It’s really wonderful. The bar cabinet is gold mirror. This adds a bit of modernity that is unexpected. Inside is basically anything you could ever need, that could be said of the bathroom and closet too. I have never seen so many conveniences like home in a hotel room.  

The bathroom is broken into three parts.  Shower and vanity area, toilet room and sink like a powder room and the tub in the corner of the room. This makes the experience of bathing and getting ready an act of choice. Each of the spaces is unique.

Painted wood wainscot with a marble and brass vanity anchor the sink and shower room. The shower is slab carerra marble, as is the powder room. The powder room has a toilet straight out of Tudor times! It has a wood bench with the porcelain beneath. A reference to the homes original toilet configuration.

The Tub is set up on a raised area in the room in the bay window area. The tub is a feature of the room and sits as a focal point directly across from the historic stove.

The terrace is lovely with views of the neighborhood. It’s dark now so more details tomorrow.

The wardrobe is a custom white oak wall unit with drawers and shelves and linen drapery. Ample room for all belongings.

I don’t think I am going to leave this hotel for the next three days!!!

More to come on the other areas of this great hotel!

Day 6 - Betsy in Stockholm - Travel to Stockholm

I traveled to Stockholm in the train from Copenhagen. The Swedish countryside is exactly like northern Minnesota. I completely understand why the Swedish people immigrated to the Midwest – specifically MN and Wisconsin. There are lakes everywhere like MN and it’s a basically flat country in the south with pine and birch trees on every horizon.

The few things I noticed as we cut through rural Sweden was the the intentional design of industrial buildings along the rail line. The buildings were painted nice colors- greens and blues and often had daylight strategies cut into their roofs. Thinking about how simple things can impact the everyday spaces like industrial warehouses is something to learn from the Swedish.

The other idea was the decoration of the domestic landscape. Lots of homes, commerical buildings and barns have small patterns on them. They add a whimsy and personality to these buildings. Lots of the homes are bright colors, a lot of reds and yellows.

Day 5 - Betsy in Copenhagen - Kurhotel in Skodsborg

This spa hotel is about 45 minutes north of Copenhagen on the coast. The hotel is a boutique luxury hotel that features a renowned spa. The  hotel was redesigned in 2017. The lobby and restaurant are very lovely and encourage you to lounge the day away and read an art book while drinking a glass of wine. Not a bad idea…

I did that but after a massage and time in the therme pools. The locker room and spa rooms, and lounge was quite lovely. Very nice furniture and great views of the sea (it was cloudy when I was there).

The therme pools were the star. With four therme pools, 5 different saunas, 4 different steam areas, showers, outdoor and indoor cool plunge and hot tubs, it was a wonderful circuit. The spa was filled with locals, which was great to see. I read an article that said the hotel has marketed to CEOs as a business club focused on wellness. They have CrossFit and a gym and are across from the sea and do water activities in the sea when the weather is right.

I have been to many, many spas when I travel. This is in my top three – of all time.

I will be coming back.

Day 4 - Betsy in Copenhagen - HAY Design Showroom

HAY Design makes modern home furniture and accessories. They do not have much representation in the US, although I heard Herman Miller will be starting to resell it this year in the US.

They showroom was wonderful. Amazing accessories, platters, rugs, blankets and decorative objects. The furniture was great too.

They don’t ship to the US so we will have to wait for HM to get access for us to add to our office.

Day 4 - Betsy in Copenhagen - Danish Design Museum

The Danish Design Museum is a museum dedicated to the preservation and showcase of Danish craft in the decorative arts, industrial design and textile design. The museum had two shows on. The first was Danish Design Now, showcasing current designers, architects and artists. They featured their work and was very similar and had cross over to the show at A Petersen’s museum featuring the Danish arts council. I was impressed by the interconnection between the disciplines in Denmark. When they talk about Design – they are inclusive of fine arts and crafts makers as well as industrial, interior and architectural design. We have much to learn about these relationships and need to reshape the conversation about design at all scales in Mpls. The work we do at Studio BV is always discussed as a matter of scale when we work on projects - all scales, furniture, graphic, interior, landscape, architectural. We have a lot to learn from the Danish design community.

The second show was about the modern chair. Beginning with the bent wood chair no. 14 in 1859 by Thonet to contemporary designs. The focus was on chair design relationships. They had a series of three chairs stacked vertically. The chairs showed relationships over time of form and material. It was a great show. The Danes had led and reinvented for decades in modern furniture design. I think in the midwest we get so focused on Eames, Saarinen and Bertoia that we overlook the Wagner, Kjaerholm, Jacobsen, Mogenson. We do now often use in our work designs from Muuto, Fritz Hansen, Normann, Gubi, and others.

Day 3 - Betsy in Copenhagen - The Louisiana Museum, Humlenaek Denmark

The Lousianna is located about an hour outside of Copenhagen and is the Modern Art Museum of Denmark. It is a beautiful complex of small buildings that sit on the water with both a large outdoor sculpture collection and a diverse collection inside.

The shows featured at this time were of Cecily Brown the British Painter, a show on the moon by Maren, and an exhibit on Alejandro Aravena the recent Pritzker Prize winner from Chile.

The museum complex is unique. The buildings have been added on to several times and the way-finding and circulation is complex. They site is lovely and in summer would be incredible to visit.

The café was heralded by many and it offered a lot of cold fish dishes with mayonnaise…I don’t really understand the reputation..

The museum was really great and I particularly liked the Aravena show. It was designed by his firm and they used cardboard as the structure for the displays. It was really simple and powerful. Aravena wrote about how simplicity is the key to his practice. They have 15 people to keep the studio manageable. They are doing very invasive work and their display of internal processes was powerful. Very simple sketches and massing models is the foundation for a lot of their work. They keep the ideas and the forms very basic using light, gravity and mass to convey the design intent.

Day 3 - Betsy in Copenhagen - A Petersen Furniture Studio, Workshop and Museum

I got a private tour of the A Petersen showroom, studio, workshop and museum. A Petersen is connected to the family of Poul Kjaerholm and the workshop he lead for 50 years. They also are connected to the foundation of Finn Juhl and work on his restorations and some re-releases of his work too. The workshop has their own furniture line as well as works to maintain and restore originals for these families and foundations. They studio works to create new works in the same quality and craft as the furniture that as produced in the 50s and 60s. The pieces are made to order and hand made there in the workshop. They are using dried seaweed as the Upholstry inserts in stead of foam or springs.

The studio and gallery displays artists in ceramics, textiles, fine arts, glass and other media.

The work was spectacular and the dedication to the legacy and future of danish modern furniture was unlike any other.

The upper level to the workshop is a museum for the Danish National Arts Council. They had a show on display that celebrated the connection between Japan and Danish arts and design for over 50 years. They had 100 artists and designers displayed in the show that focused on mixed media of all types.

I bought a stool for our studio that will be shipped to us in the next few weeks.