Stockholm by design

Words and images by Dominic O’Grady

Ours was a dismal performance, to be sure. Two gay men who grew up on ABBA in the 1970s should have done a half-decent job of Thank You For The Music, especially when the words are right in front of you and the backing track is in play. But we made a muckle of it.

The tagline for Stockholm’s interactive ABBA Museum is ‘some music never dies – it multiplies’. To prove that point, visitors are encouraged to step into one of the museum’s sound booths and audition for the band, karaoke style. You scan your ticket, select a song, and off you go.

The museum – one of the top three in Sweden – pulls quite a few Australians. We hear the accents of fellow travellers ahead in the queue, and once inside, come across a group of senior Australians who quipped ‘we see this all the time at the RSL’.

Visitors who are fired-up after their first audition, or who remain bravely undeterred, can take the next step and join ABBA on stage. All you need to do is choose a song, stand on the spot marked with an X, and unleash your inner dancing queen. Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Frida are holograms, so they don’t mind if you miss a cue or three.

‘Fel’, which is Swedish for failure, is clearly not in the museum’s vocabulary. Nor should it be, given ABBA’s roaring success after winning the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, with Waterloo. Two years later, Fernando sat at the top of our national music charts for a record-breaking 14 straight weeks. More Australians watched the ABBA TV special that year than watched the moon landing in 1968.

ABBA The Museum documents all this and more. It’s a glorious collection of outrageously camp costumes, memories and guitars, spread over two floors. The takeaway message is clear: you can dance, you can jive, and you can still have the time of your life. What’s not to like about that?

ABBA The Museum, Djurgårdsvägen 68, Stockholm www.abbathemuseum.com

Svenskt Tenn

Stockholm has a distinctive design aesthetic, expressed in the dreamy colour palette of modern ceramicists such as Erika Petersdotter and reaching its apogee in the riotously colourful interior design emporium, Firma Svenskt Tenn.

Working from her studio in the once gritty but now hip Stockholm district of Södermalm, Erika Petersdotter makes and sells ethereal ceramics. Her work communicates the same understated elegance that ripples through so much of Stockholm: it’s simultaneously confident, sexy and functional.

Firma Svenskt Tenn is just as elegant but you could never say understated. Art teacher Estrid Ericson established this showroom and design studio in 1924, specialising initially in pewter. She quickly became a “Purveyor to His Majesty” and in partnership with architect and designer Josef Frank, broadened Svenskt Tenn’s output to include locally designed furniture, textiles and other homewares.

The two-storey showroom facing Stockholm harbour is open to the public but it’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s a colour-saturated high-quality emporium that has the potential to not only burn a retina but also send credit cards into meltdown. You don’t get many Kroner for your dollar.

After wandering around for a while, admiring all and sundry, our in-store conversation ran something like this:

‘Look at that pink and orange lounge! Can we get it?’

‘No’

‘What about a few of the swirly purple cushions?’

‘No. They won’t fit in the cabin bag.’

‘All right then. But come and have a look at this...’

Laid out on before us was an Aladdin’s collection of fine Swedish table linen in every imaginable shade: gold, amber, ruby and emerald; mineral blue and moody charcoal; birch, copper, stone and lichen. We were immediately seduced and are now the immodestly proud owners of beautiful table linen in four shades of forest green.

Erika Petersdotter, Sankt Paulsgatan 11, Södermalm, Stockholm www.erika-petersdotter.se

Svenskt Tenn Stranvagen 5, Stockholm www.svenskttenn.se

Kungliga Biblioteket

An Australian friend who follows the influential British architect and interior designer, Ben Pentreath, alerted us to Swedish Classical, a series of blog posts by Pentreath about his recent visit to Stockholm, ‘one of the most inspirational cities I know’. Swedish Classical provided a perfect introduction to Stockholm design, starting with Svenskt Tenn and ending with the National Library of Sweden, the Kungliga Biblioteket.

Designed by Swedish architect Gustaf Dahl and built from cast iron in the late-1800s, the library’s public reading room has a light-filled, modern-gothic dreaminess to it that puts you in mind of the magnificent research library in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. In both look and feel, the Kungliga Biblioteket and Rijksmuseum Research Library underwrite the future suggested by their cast iron contemporary, Gustave Eiffel’s tower in Paris.

Kungliga Biblioteket Humlegården, Stockholm www.kb.se

Where to stay

Hotel Rival, in Södermalm, deserves its consistently good reviews. Within walking distance of Stockholm Harbour, the Royal Palace, and most major sights. Rooms are excellent, the staff are friendly and breakfast is a treat. Kudos to owner Benny Andersson (yes, that Benny Andersson) for making red velvet classy again.

Hotel Rival, Mariatorget 3, Stockholm www.rival.se

Where to eat

Sturehof is often mentioned as the restaurant you have to try. Design bible Monocle reckons its one of the world’s top ten. It specialises in seafood and does a very good job. Less hyped but just as rewarding is the Lisa Elmqvist restaurant, which usually sits in the Östermalmshallen food hall. While Östermalmshallen is being renovated, you can enjoy one of the best seafood meals in Stockholm at Lisa Elmqvist’s temporary digs next door. Finally, don’t skip Hotel Rival’s own bistro, thinking hotel restaurants are all the same. That would be a big mistake.

Restaurant Sturehof www.sturehof.com/en/

Lisa Elmqvist www.lisaelmqvist.se/sv

Rival Bar & Bistro www.rival.se/en/bar-bistro-cafe/bistro/