You wouldn’t be alone if your first thought, upon seeing pictures of Daniel Heckscher’s Stockholm apartment, was: How can I reconfigure my life in order to live in a place just like this? For us, this was followed by a second, slightly more reasonable thought: We should repaint. It may come as no surprise to learn that Heckscher is an interior architect at Note Design Studio, the Swedish team that’s gained a reputation for perfect color palettes, well-proportioned products, and stunning spaces.
In the summer of 2014, Heckscher began renovating what was essentially a white box, taking an inventive, playful approach, including some input from his six-year-old son, Otis, and four-year-old daughter, India. “This project was like a workshop where I could try out ideas and materials.” In a way, that open, improvisational quality reflects Heckscher’s path as a designer. He didn’t fall into the profession immediately. With a background in economics, there was a time he thought he’d “end up like a Wall Street guy, doing finance. But I stayed clear of that, which in the end, turned out to be a wise choice.” It wasn’t until he was close to 30 that he started studying interior and spatial design formally, first as an undergraduate in Milan before returning to Stockholm and earning his MFA at the prestigious Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Not too long after that, he was creating interiors for clients at Note.
With this space, Heckscher changed what he could while making other constraints work for him. The apartment is in a “quite ugly building from 1988,” he says. “It has this pinkish-orange façade that was very common at the time in Sweden… it’s not the height of Swedish architecture, 1988. I was thinking, how do I deal with this exterior color, because it’s going to be present the whole time in the living room and kitchen area.” He decided to bring it into the design, using a similar shade for those rooms, along with a super-saturated, atmospheric blue he’d used in his previous home. That continuity was important to him. Heckscher moved here after a divorce, “so this was a fresh start,” he says. But along with the new, he wanted to incorporate some familiar elements to provide a sense of security for his kids.
While he tends to resist the more austere side of Swedish design, his sensibility seems distinctly Scandinavian in the way it manages to be comfortable and inviting but still cool and spare. It’s captured beautifully here by photographer Tekla Severin, who is also a Stockholm-based interior architect and the creator of one of our favorite Instagram feeds. When we reached Heckscher recently on the phone to learn more, he was as thoughtful, engaging, and unpretentious as his work would suggest.
The front door is in the back of the apartment, opening onto a long hallway with no natural light. To add some depth and texture and to keep it bright, Heckscher tiled the floor and the walls. His daughter, India, chose the pink color. (Those are her sneakers and her jacket). If she outgrows pink will he have to change everything? “She might, but I won’t,” he says.
“I had this idea of ‘no white’ whatsoever in the apartment,” says Heckscher, but he wanted to do this herringbone pattern in the hallway and white tile was all that was readily available at the time of the renovation. So he went with it. “If there’s somewhere where no one would put white, it’s in the hallway, so I’m gonna do that,” he jokes.
Visuals aside, the tile is also practical. “In Sweden, we take our shoes off when we enter a home, but I knew I would keep running back and forth in this hallway, because I keep forgetting keys to the car or whatever.” And he notes, “it doesn’t matter how much mud the kids take home, I can just wipe everything off.”
Heckscher designed the bathroom’s made-to-order Corian sink. “It’s a big-ass sink so the kids can splash around all they want.” Reflected in the mirror is a canvas he “started a while ago, covered up because it was quite shitty, and haven’t finished. It sits on the wall if anyone feels like painting. Like my kids, for example.”
For hanging bathroom towels, Heckscher installed Gym wall hooks by Swedish designer Staffan Holm for HAY.
When he started the redesign, he intended to fill his new home with objects that had some kind of significance for him, and he confesses he initially went a little overboard collecting things. “I went to this design auction and I bought so many objects thinking, ‘This would be perfect in my new apartment.’” But when the place was finished, and he brought everything in, he realized he had to pare back. A lot of it was “wrong in the color, or wrong in the expression, or it was too much expression.”
The Sling chair and Area table here are both designed by Note for the Swedish furniture company Fogia. The standing brass lamp — a classic, modernist Josef Frank lamp for the Swedish brand Svenskt Tenn — belonged to Heckscher’s grandfather. The blue-painted cladding and patterned wooden strips mounted to the wall run throughout the living area.
Heckscher, sitting next to a vessel Dutch designer Hella Jongerius did for Ikea about a decade ago.
Heckscher found these oars by the Canadian brand Norquay Co. on Instagram. “She makes these paddles with fantastic patterns. I wanted to buy them all.” He settled for a couple, though, when faced with the cost of shipping to Sweden. They work as a “kind of symbol” for bringing the outdoors inside. “Instead of putting my bike or my skis on the wall, I can put a pair of paddles. It’s a little bit more aesthetically pleasing.” Heckscher’s apartment is located about 15 minutes outside of the city, in Saltsjöbaden, which is close to the ocean and a “huge nature preserve where we go hiking and biking.”
This table, by Stockholm-based designer Nick Ross, is “made from one solid marble block and it’s like this fading paint which shows the marble structure. When you think of all the marble that is in Greece, the ruins, you think that they’re white but they were actually painted back in the day. The marble itself wasn’t considered the final surface. So this is a play on that.” The canvas behind, Heckscher explains, is an old “birthday gift to myself: When I turned 35 I had this big party and put up two canvases on the wall, had a lot of paint, and offered everybody wine and booze and then this came out… this is how it looked around 4 in the morning. I have a lot of friends who are in design or art but when you see the other friends that are in finance or law, they never get to paint, and it’s fun to see them. They just go berserk.”
Through the window you can see a slice of the pink-orange exterior wall that influenced Heckscher’s choice of paint color in the living room.
How does he keep his place so clean with two small kids? “I don’t,” he admits. It’s “a mess half of the time, but I try to keep some parts a bit tidy. My bedroom for example. I like a bit of calm when I hit the bed.”
This lamp — called Topp, designed by Hallgeir Homstvedt — is one of Heckscher’s favorite objects, from Established & Sons. The pink ceramic piggy bank belongs to his daughter.
Heckscher draws design inspiration from many sources, but especially from his Note colleagues. “At Note, it’s really a social kind of work and a totally flat organization. We’re always having design discussions and finding interesting stuff that we share.” Heckscher also particularly admires Patricia Urquiola and the Bouroullec brothers, Ronan and Erwan. “I like the way they work and the way Urquiola works with structures and patterns.”
Heckscher started over in the kitchen, tearing out the plastic flooring and replacing it with oak. “I wanted to have some kind of presence of wood in the apartment because I didn’t have it anywhere else.” Older kitchen floors in Sweden have traditionally been to painted in this pattern, Kechsher notes, but usually in black and white. He went with blue to match the floor in the dining area.
To a certain degree, Heckscher’s take on color, pattern, and texture are a reaction to the legacy of functionalism in Swedish design, which he finds to be “a little bit of a burden.” When Modernism came to Sweden, it was “called functionalism and everything had to have a function. If it didn’t have a function, it had to go.” He remains influenced by his time in Milan, where “they’re working from a totally different design perspective.”
Heckscher’s Konstfack classmate Mari Helen Wahlberg made this print, whose text “Plötsligt blev det jul” translates to “Suddenly it’s Christmas.” The Muuto dining chairs are a new product fabricated in a sustainable composite material and the table is “an old favorite” from the Italian company Accademia. Heckscher refinished it to go with the interior. “Originally it was white with chrome legs. Plus, it needed sanding because of all the fork-marks the kids have put into the table.”
On local color: “If you would take a really full, vivid color from close to the equator, like a Moroccan or Indian color scheme, these vivid colors, and you try to recreate it in the Scandinavian light, it falls flat because we don’t have that warm light. It’s much colder. So even though my apartment’s really colorful, it’s not done with these colors that need really warm light because that would never work here.”
The blue paint carried through the living area and the bedroom is a fairly new color compound sold in Sweden that “has the quality of a proper wall color but it’s completely matte,” giving it this “super soft feeling.”
The bedding and some of the pillows come from HAY, though the pillow in front is designed by Heckscher’s friend Christina Nordlind Hejdenberg, who runs the label Fibers & Friends.
These Glo-ball lamps from Flos, designed by Jasper Morrison, were “one of the first design objects I discovered a long time ago,” says Heckscher. “And Jasper is Jasper. Legend.” The cactus, which he bought at Stockholm’s Dahl Agenturer, “is a way of keeping some green in the room without ever have to put water on it. I really don’t know how to handle flowers, but at least I have this one.”
In any designer’s career, there are hundreds of split-second decisions that conspire to create the precise conditions under which good work can emerge. For the Swedish-born, London-based designer Hilda Hellström, it came down to this one: When she was asked to create a project for this year’s Royal College of Art exhibition at the Milan Furniture Fair, she says with a laugh, “the wood workshop was quite busy, but the resin workshop was nice and quiet.” Of course, there’s more to the recent grad's breakout Sedimentation vases than that; Hellström is obsessed with the idea of imbuing her objects with a myth and narrative of their own. But in many ways the vessels — which are made from layers of pigmented Jesmonite, a non-toxic acrylic-based plaster often used in ceilings and restoration work — are a reaction against something else. “My father was a carpenter, so I was used to working with wood, and I was bored of how you have to consider that it’s a living material,” she says. “Wood tells you what to make, but working with a moldable material like Jesmonite is almost like playing God.”
Fredrik Paulsen’s work, both as a designer and as a co-founder of Stockholm’s brilliant Örnsbergsauktionen is shaking the foundations of what you think Scandinavian design ought to be. “Here you are taught to produce work for the everyman,” Paulsen says. “It’s the legacy of IKEA: Good design for everyone. But if your work doesn’t really fit into mass production and it is not intended for it, then there is no platform or venue to show it.” It was this void that led Paulsen and his friends and fellow designers Simon Klenell and Kristoffer Sundin to stage their first auction during last year’s Stockholm’s Design Week. They invited contemporaries — some they knew, others they only knew of — to submit diverse, self-made works that went beyond the cookie-cutter forms they’d grown tired of, and put them up for bidding. It paid off.
No pun intended, but we had to share one last find from this month’s Stockholm Design Week: Last, a new arena for selling one-of-a-kind products by Swedish design trio Åsa Jungnelius, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, and Fredrik Paulsen. They are, respectively, a glass designer working with glass, a potter with clay and a furniture designer with wood. All share a common desire for not only producing sustainable products, but also to promote a kind of design that is slower, more considered, and intended to stand the test of time (i.e. the last spoon you might ever buy).
