A little history first
Svenskt Tenn was founded in 1924 by Estrid Ericson. The name means Swedish pewter, which is how the house started. In 1934 she began working with Josef Frank, an Austrian architect who had settled in Stockholm, and that partnership shaped everything that followed. His fabrics, furniture and lamps are still made and sold there today, many of them designed decades ago. Walking through, it feels like someone's very good home.
The quiet corners
The first thing I noticed was how calm some corners are. A walnut console against a pale wall. A lamp with a soft white shade, a couple of books, and a glass vase of sunflowers. That's it. Nothing else is asking for your attention, so the flowers get all of it.
I love this, because it is exactly how I like to build a room. Calm everywhere, and courage in one place. Here the courage is a handful of sunflowers, and that is enough.
Then the room where everything happens
Turn around and there is the library wall. Books from floor to ceiling, a striped sofa, a copper topped table on a turned wooden leg, a bright blue stool, and a rug covered in colourful spots. On paper it should be too much.
It works, and I spent a while trying to understand why. Nothing in that room looks bought as a set. Every piece looks chosen on its own, by someone who simply liked it. The stripes, the copper and the blue have nothing in common except the person who picked them, and that turns out to be what holds the room together.
Frank had a word for this. Later in life he wrote about what he called accidentism: the idea that a home should look as if it came together over time, out of things you love.
My favourite corner
My favourite corner was a sitting area by a tall arched window over the water. A deep sofa in a big floral print, a round marble table, a red carpet, and the view framed by the arch. One bold piece, a quiet room around it, and the window doing the rest. For me it is the clearest lesson in the whole house.
What I would take home to Dubai
Many apartments in Dubai start out the other way round. Everything is new, everything arrives at once, often from the same place. They look finished on day one, and then they never really change.
If I were bringing a little of Svenskt Tenn home, I would start with one piece I truly love. A patterned armchair, a sofa in a print, an old lamp with a story. Then I would keep the big surfaces around it quiet: the walls, the curtains, the rug. And I would let the rest arrive slowly, one thing at a time, each one because I love it.
Light matters too. A print that looks soft under a Stockholm sky reads brighter in Dubai sun, so I like a print with a calm background, where the colour lives in the pattern itself.
If you are ever in Stockholm, give it an afternoon, and find the sofa by the arched window.
All photographs are my own, taken at Svenskt Tenn, Strandvägen 5, Stockholm, in September 2026.