About 100 kilometres south of Stockholm, near Trosa, Tureholm Castle stands like a cube on a hill, overlooking the Baltic Sea and its hundreds of islands, barely distinguishable from the rugged coastline.
This site was originally occupied by Gäddeholm, the fortress of a nobleman called Nils Gädda, and was acquired in the 17th century by the Bielke family, who gave the castle its current form. In 1719, Count Thure Gabriel Bielke, a military officer, was working as an ambassador in Vienna when he received news that Russian troops had looted and set fire to his ancestral seat. In 1728, Thure finally returned to his home country and rebuilt Tureholm, where his descendants remained until 1917. He worked with the architect Carl Hårleman, who had studied at the Académie Royale d’Architecture in Paris and the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture. Although the exterior was designed with almost military rigidity, the interior of the three-storey residence is warmer, more intimate. It contains a beautiful library; several Bielke family portraits; a room fully lined with Aubusson rugs, and others hung with an impressive array of 18th-century paintings, reflecting the worldliness of the current owners. And while most of the original furnishings have been replaced over the years, Hårleman’s severe and classical design conceals a more whimsical surprise: the Chinese-inspired kitchen on the ground floor, originally created to display a collection of blue-and-white porcelain.
Today the kitchen is an empty shell, faded yet strangely poetic. The collection was sold off when Tureholm changed hands in 1917, revealing the playful painted décor that had previously been hidden behind china plates. The room presents something of a mystery. Was Count Thure – a military man, after all – really responsible for its charming design? Even with the aid of a well-travelled architect such as Hårleman, it seems unlikely to me.
Although the fashion for chinoiserie had long been established elsewhere, it was relatively new to Sweden when work on the kitchen began in 1744, at the end of the rebuilding project. Thirteen years prior, in 1731, Sweden had created its own East India Company based in Gothenburg. It was one of the last companies of its kind to be launched in Europe and, as a result, the country was soon flooded with all manner of ‘exotic’ objets.
The kitchen took four years to complete. At the time, Thure Gabriel Bielke would not have been able to visit Drottningholm’s Chinese pavilion (WoI May 1996) – given by King Adolf Frederick to his queen, Louisa Ulrika, in 1761 and since rebuilt – even in its initial wooden form. Perhaps, while in Vienna, he had the opportunity to make a detour to visit Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin with its porcelain cabinet containing 2,700 pieces of blue-and-white, some held up by life-size figures of mandarins in an excess of ornamentation. If not, might Thure, his wife or Hårleman have laid eyes on Martin Engelbrecht’s etchings of the room?
Long before, a ‘Trianon de Porcelaine’ had been built at Versailles, where Trianon itself stands today, as a sort of folly or royal joke following the creation of the French East India Company in 1664. Fully decorated with blue-and-white trompe l’oeil, it mimicked the appearance of porcelain and offered a place for Louis XIV to meet his mistress, Madame de Montespan, at the bottom of the park (the structure was hastily destroyed after Madame de Maintenon arrived on the scene).
Curator Johan Cederlund, who has written a book on Tureholm, discovered that ‘the local craftsman Carl Fredrik Engelkrona, commissioned to paint the walls and furniture of the kitchen, was reprimanded by the count (no doubt in a hurry to get the job done), who thought it was too expensive to paint Chinese motifs on the doors as well’. Surely this proves the idea did not come from him?
The square, almost cubic, room features a high, multi-vaulted ceiling and looks out on to the grounds through two large windows facing the fireplace. The fittings consist of a substructure made up of plinths, panelling around the windows, sideboards, shelves reaching up to the ceiling and clusters of brackets in the form of Rococo faces, intended to display a collection of matching cup-and-saucer sets. The walls, furniture and doors are like a single skin, decorated in a seemingly hasty fashion with the same light-blue lines. Everything is encompassed in the design, like a contemporary projection on to a plain-white room.
On a roughly brushed faux-marble background, a disorderly assemblage of pagodas and tea houses is interspersed with scenes of men, women and children drinking tea, strolling over bridges and past fantastical, disproportionately sized plants, just as one would expect to find on a Qianlong ceramic. Fluffy, navy-blue clouds drift across the ceiling, accompanied by a flight of exotic, stylised birds that appear surprisingly modern within the architectural space. It is said that Countess Bielke liked to invite guests for refreshments in the kitchen, which was stocked with all the latest spices arriving into Gothenburg, such as pepper. Was she secretly responsible for the blue-and-white galley? We may never know.
Following completion of the kitchen, the castle saw its glory years, the highlight being a visit from King Frederick during a family christening, just before the death of Count Ture Gabriel Bielke in 1763. After being sold to the Gullberg family in 1917, Tureholm Castle was stripped of much of its furniture, paintings and objects, including the porcelain collection. While its current owners, the Bonde family, never made it their permanent residence, they did allow Ingmar Bergman to film some scenes for the 1982 period film Fanny and Alexander there. Sadly, the fanciful blue kitchen didn’t make the final cut.
A version of this article originally appears in the April 2025 issue of The World of Interiors. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
