Product Description

Beautiful images reveal the Swedish room as a work of art that has a place in every home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #513523 in Books
• Published on: 1995-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

From Amazon.com
The Swedish palette of soft pastels conveys an aesthetic simplicity like no other. Even though I do not live in a stately mansion or a castle (beautifully photographed throughout the book) I became inspired to add the same colors and textures to my own decor. Stenciled borders, tromp l' oleil, marbling, and delicately painted wall canvases add harmony and warmth to your living space.

Ingram
Spare, light-filled rooms, pale wood floors, simple furniture with elegant lines--these are the hallmarks of Swedish interior design. In this book, art historians Lars and Ursula Sjoberg trace the development of Swedish style from its beginnings in the 17th century through the restorations and reinterpretations that have brought it into the 20th century. Color illustrations throughout.

From the Back Cover
the Swedish interior has been an endless source of imitation. The Swedish Room guides the reader through more than two hundred breathtaking images and an authoritative accompanying text which focus on those special features of the traditional Swedish room that have made it one of the major influences in decorating today.

Whether in a royal guest room or a farmer's kitchen, the traditional details -- wide-board, unpolished wooden floors, simple checked or striped fabrics, the elegant outlines of a Gustavian chair, and the gleaming tiles of a ceramic stove -- all work to delight the eye.

Ursula and Lars Sjoberg trace the development of the quintessential Swedish room from the seventeenth century through its heyday in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to its reinterpretations today. With glorious photograph by Ingalill Snitt, The Swedish Room is booth a source of practical decorating ideas and an irresistible voyage of discovery through some of the world's most appealing interiors.

Praise for The Swedish Room

"The Swedes have long been some of the cleverest colorists around, as Lars and Ursula Sjoberg reveal in their new book."

-- Town and Country

"[Here are] inspiring images of rough-edged but strangely regal eighteenth-century farms, country houses, and city mansions. Poetic, accessible juxtapositions abound. Homespun gingham checks upholster Versailles - style chairs. Town houses display humble whitewashed walls, while artful stenciling decorates their country cousins."

-- Mitchell Owens, New York Times

Customer Reviews

The Swedish Room
Beautiful book, well researched and written with carefully selected and beautiful photos. A must have for anyone interested in Gustavian interiors and the homes that contain them. The interiors selected for this book are the relatively simpler ones with soft color schemes and a cleaner, pared-down look - ones more acceptable to contemporary tastes - rather than the gilded neoclassical palaces of the same period. If you are interested in the more palatial interiors of the same period I recommend: Neoclassicism in the North, Swedish Furniture and Interiors 1770-1850 . I noticed in browsing through this book, that a number of the interiors selected for inclusion in The Swedish Room are actually the simplest rooms in otherwise grand palaces.
A very pleasing selection of interior views overall and much better than Barbara Stoeltie's similar book, The Country Houses of Sweden.

A Decorative Artist`s Delight
This is a wonderful book for an a decorative artist or faux- finisher. It has a wealth of information you can use in designing ideas for this very popular time in history . I have used this book many times in designing art for furniture and walls .A must-have for any decorative artist or designer.