Katarina Abrahamsson and Anders Annerstedt live just outside Stockholm. Anders is an architect and Katarina an interior designer for the firm Svenskt Tenn, to whose premises she takes the water bus every morning. Their neighbourhood is a succession of rocky, wooded hills on small islands separated by branches of the Baltic Sea; they’re easily mistaken for lakes or rivers since the saltwater infiltrates everywhere. It’s a chic area, largely made up of elegant 1930s wooden villas. Part Russian, part Austrian and with a touch of fairy tale, they conjure up an image of familial, domestic bliss, Swedish-style, as immortalised in the paintings of Carl Larsson.
But Katarina and Anders’s modest brick house, built by an engineer in 1960, is a different proposition altogether. The tone is set the moment you set foot in the entrance, where Anders has retained the original agglomerated stone flooring. On it sits a Hans Wegner chest of drawers flanked by two Josef Frank chairs and a collection of pewter. The entrance hall leads to a spare bedroom, to the study where Anders works and receives his architectural clients, and to a vast open living area used both as somewhere to watch TV and a waiting room for clients. Opposite the front door, in a somewhat unexpected sculptural flight, the staircase – inspired by Katarina – curves round, bisecting a wall of books that reaches all the way up to the middle of the first floor.
Apart from the bedroom and bathroom, the space is entirely open. Upstairs, you find the kitchen on one side, and the living room on the other. In between, the dining room consists simply of a Bouroullec brothers table surrounded by Wegner chairs, and hanging above it an immense 32-bulb chandelier designed in Germany for a church. ‘The moment I saw it I knew it was exactly the same size as the table,’ says Anders. ‘It sets off the spaciousness of the room at the same time as creating the dining space. And then, I love electric lightbulbs. I want them to be as visible as possible. Perhaps it comes from the film Clockwork Orange – Stanley Kubrick uses lots of them.’
On a floor of white rubber tiles that bounces the light around, Anders has designed a kitchen composed of teak modules ‘linking together like the chords in a jazz piece’. Each unit fulfils a particular function and meets the perfectionist needs of the aesthete and cook that is Anders. They even allow him to include a secret drawer – made from a different wood – for the silverware. This architectural arrangement places him in front of an audience that he can seat on stools along a bar while he busies himself between his ovens and his tiny steel basin – almost a jewel – for washing his chanterelles. He has only to turn round to reach a plate, a saucepan or a bottle, and he has only to take a step to place his dish on the table. Here the teak, which is to be found all over the house, is interrupted by a set of Sicilian earthenware tiles featuring an Etruscan-style pattern that turns out to represent the Star of David.
Not a lot of space or style has really been apportioned to the main bedroom and its dressing area. ‘It’s just a white cube with above all nothing on the ceiling’, just a 1960s dresser beneath a picture by Albert Hanson. This, the minimum of furniture, is intended to show off the window designed, as throughout the house, to be a clearly defined wooden frame for the natural world outside: the forest, the birches, the shrubs with red berries, the khaki-green sea glimmering with flashes of light. ‘We sometimes even see deer. They come very close. The wolves are 50km away.’
Separated from the kitchen by the dining room, the living room occupies two corners. One faces the sea – where they swim in the summer – while the other looks on to a hill. Beneath the television that stands opposite a big plump brown velvet sofa is a row of LPs ten metres long. ‘I like people to display their tastes clearly,’ says Anders. Arne Jacobsen, Gae Aulenti, Johannes Andersen, Tobia Scarpa, Hans Wegner, Achille Castiglioni, the Bouroullec brothers and Fornasetti: they are all there as if to counterbalance the spirit of Josef Frank. The Austrian-born architect came to Stockholm as a refugee in 1933 and worked with Estrid Ericson, founder of Svenskt Tenn, until 1962. He designed some 50 prints in the 1940s as well as nearly 2,000 pieces of furniture, lamps, vases, carafes and glasses in the functionalist style that defined Swedish Modernism – in his case, tempered by a certain elegance and grace.
Katarina, who has worked at Svenskt Tenn for 20 years, particularly likes its objets d’art and furniture. Anders prefers emptiness. This compromise has produced a calm, ‘classical’, light-filled and eminently civilised space. They have both travelled. Anders has spent several periods living on the west coast of the United States. He studied architecture in Los Angeles at the SCI before returning to live in Sweden in the 2000s, joining the architect Anki Linde (WoI Oct 2007). This diverted him from his initial dream of being a film-maker, which had seen him studying in Berkeley several years previously.
‘In this house,’ says Anders, ‘I have perhaps, without realising it, created the setting for a film drama by imagining the character that might have lived here at the time the house was built – in the 1960s – by attributing tastes, habits and a whole life to him.’ The next time it will undoubtedly be more 1970s, he thinks. ‘I’ll start out with an object by Joe Colombo, my Gae Aulenti lamp or perhaps one of these “fantastically ugly” objects by Ron Arad that Katarina is fond of’.
For more information about Anders Annerstedt’s work, visit lslarchitects.com
A version of this article also appeared in the March 2018 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
