Carl and Karin Larsson’s Sundborn: the home that became a style

Lilla Hyttnäs at Sundborn in Dalarna was the home of Carl and Karin Larsson from 1888. Karin designed textiles and furniture, Carl painted the house and the family, and when the watercolours were published in the book Ett hem (A Home) in 1899, the rooms became a model for the whole of Sweden. Its hallmarks are light colours and white woodwork, old vernacular furniture mixed with newly designed pieces, and Karin’s weavings with simple geometric patterns.

Facts

A home rebuilt over many years

Carl and Karin Larsson met in the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing in France, where both painted, and married in 1883. In 1888 they received the little farmstead Lilla Hyttnäs at Sundborn from Karin’s father. Over the following years they added extensions, moved walls and furnished room after room, and the house became the family home and Carl’s studio.

What makes the home unusual is that it was not furnished in a single style. Old vernacular furniture and 18th-century pieces bought locally were mixed with furniture that Karin and Carl designed themselves and that carpenters in Sundborn made. The furniture was repainted, the rooms were given light colours and white woodwork, and the heavy curtains and dark wallpapers that were common in homes of the 1880s were absent.

Karin Larsson, the designer

Karin Larsson trained as a painter but after her marriage devoted herself to the home, the textiles and the furniture. Her weavings in vernacular techniques such as rölakan and dukagång have strong colours in simple geometric fields and look almost abstract. She embroidered, sewed the children’s clothes and her own, and designed furniture with straight, simple forms.

For a long time the home was seen as Carl’s work, since it was his pictures that circulated. Today Karin is regarded as one of the early modern designers in Sweden, and her textiles show how vernacular techniques could be used in a new way. Read more about the techniques in the guide to rya and rölakan.

Carl Larsson’s pictures

Carl Larsson painted the family’s everyday life in watercolour: the children, the meals, the rooms and the garden. Breakfast Under the Big Birch of 1896 shows the family at table out in the yard. The series of pictures from the home was shown at the exhibition in Stockholm in 1897 and published in 1899 in the book Ett hem.

The pictures have clear outlines and light, flat fields of colour, influenced by Japanese woodcuts and Art Nouveau. They show a home where the children were given room and where the simple and home-made was beautiful, and they circulated in books and prints in Sweden and, not least, in Germany.

Beauty for all

Sundborn suited its time. In the same year as Ett hem appeared, Ellen Key published the pamphlet Skönhet för alla (Beauty for All), in which she argued that beautiful and simple things would make everyday life better for all people. The home at Sundborn became an example of what she meant: light, practical and personal, with craftsmanship instead of factory-made splendour.

The ideas came from the English Arts and Crafts movement and from the interest in vernacular peasant culture, but took on a Swedish form. Read more about the period under the Swedish turn of the century, when the home crafts movement also emerged.

Visiting the Carl Larsson house

The house is owned today by the descendants of Carl and Karin Larsson and is shown to visitors with a guide. The rooms stand almost as they did when the family lived there, with Karin’s textiles, the painted furniture and Carl’s studio. Anyone who has seen the pictures in Ett hem will recognise them: the rooms look like the watercolours.

Look for the mixture of old and new, the painted decoration on doors and furniture and the way the light falls through the windows without heavy curtains. That is precisely what made Sundborn a model for the light Swedish home, far into the 20th century of Scandinavian design.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who designed most of the textiles and many of the pieces of furniture in the home at Sundborn?