A Stockholm time-capsule gallery, revived by a London decorator

“It feels like Carl Eldh walked out the door and never came back.” Sara Bourke, director of Stockholm’s Carl Eldhs Ateljémuseum paints a vivid image of the otherworldly scene at the artist’s studio-turned-museum – a time capsule in which his sculptures appear just as he left them on his death in 1954.

The space is a million miles away from our own surroundings, as we sip coffee in Beata Heuman’s London townhouse studio. Heuman, a fellow Swede, is the first-ever interior designer granted permission to update several rooms at the museum, which was built in 1919 within the city’s Bellevue Park.

The designer flips open her laptop and we pore over photographs on the screen. The images reveal the ephemera of everyday life: myriad sketches, plaster models and sculpture, the most striking a survey of the human form in marble, clay and bronze. Eldh studied in Paris as a young man, finding a kindred spirit in Rodin. He reached the zenith in his own artistry in 1911, aged 38, when he produced what is arguably his most famous sculpture, The Youth: two young lovers, hands clasped in an eternal clinch. 

The scale of his work is palpable. Colossal busts and statues rest on plinths, shelves and pedestals, dwarfing tiny maquettes of such exacting character one half imagines they could burst into life. “It’s Sweden’s hidden gem,” Bourke says of the museum. “I want it to be a destination for sculpture but also for contemporary art.”

It is largely due to the tenacity of Eldh’s daughter Brita that his studio and its artworks remain so well preserved. When the sculptor died, the aspiring dancer and mezzo-soprano, who had been living with her mother Elise in Los Angeles, returned to Sweden to safeguard his work, transforming his studio into a museum nine years later. 

We don’t have guards or ropes. Everything is touchy-feely

Carl Eldh’s legacy became her life’s work and she ran the museum almost single-handed until the 1990s. And, like the sculptor, she left an indelible mark. On her death in 2000, aged 93, she handed on a cultural salon filled with poetry and music, and the gardens she nurtured matured into an oasis where people could meet and discover artworks within the foliage. “I love the fact that while her father was quite serious, Brita seems to have been something of a bon vivant,” Heuman says. “I like sensing her spirit in the rooms. It gives energy and a future to the museum.”

Bourke, whose art-world credentials were honed at auctioneers Bukowskis, officially took over the running of the space a year and a half ago. She is laser-focused on cementing the next phase of the museum – a glorious architectural aberration designed by Carl Eldh’s close friend Ragnar Östberg, then arguably Sweden’s preeminent architect.

“Östberg was able to create this space for Eldh because he was working on Stockholm’s City Hall nearby,” Bourke explains. “In turn, many of Eldh’s most famous sculptures were made for Östberg and can be seen both inside the hall and in its sculpture garden.” They created a suitably illustrious setting – the municipal building now hosts the annual Nobel Prize banquet. 

Heuman’s first impression of Östberg’s side hustle is typical of most who encounter his “wooden palace”. “It took my breath away,” says the designer, who cut her teeth with the flamboyant decorator Nicky Haslam before establishing her own studio in 2013. Her aesthetic mixes Swedish ease and English eclecticism; she was drawn to the eccentricity of this building. “It’s this strange mix of Old Norse – the main studio having been arranged like a feasting hall – with a portico reminiscent of a Greek temple and a rotunda like a mini Pantheon,” she says. “It’s an expression of Nordic classicism very much rooted in the local vernacular and heavily inspired by Stockholm’s oldest stable, next door to the site, particularly in the tarred, wooden façade. It shouldn’t work but is so incredibly beautiful.”

Heuman could sense the artist’s presence. “Carl Eldh’s personality comes through in so many ingenious small solutions, like the rustic shelves and little nostalgic pieces he kept. It’s the closest thing to time travel,” she continues. “And the smell of the tarred wood is amazing.”

Bourke was already a fan of Heuman when she asked the designer to get involved. “We met in Eldh’s studio for what was supposed to be four to five minutes – she stayed for hours,” she recalls. 

Those precious hours were used by Heuman to inform a sensitive restoration of the museum’s visitor-facing rooms: the store within the entrance, the combined office and pantry space, and the guest cloakroom and bathroom. Referencing different eras, her rooms feel slowly aged by time, like they’ve always been there. “It had to be a natural extension of what existed,” says Heuman. “I wanted to create a fully immersive experience that feels like you’re stepping into a complete home. That meant injecting a bit of newness in a way that still felt appropriate. I wanted it to feel considered from beginning to end.”

She’s played with perspective and detailing, mirroring the compositions in Eldh’s studio rooms. Tall plinths and rustic cupboards are arranged at various heights. One is covered in canvas, another stained in a green wash. “I found the variations in the scale really interesting. The museum feels warped, ethereal, and yet what grounds everything is the materials, like pine, that would have been readily available at the time.”

The store’s maquettes are arranged on brackets backed by pewter plates that reflect their silhouette. The shop’s postcards are pinned creatively to a canvas-covered cupboard, fresh flowers fill glass vases and simple net curtains waft in the breeze just as they do in the sculptor’s airy studio (“Nets are a real Swedish thing,” Heuman laughs, “and linseed oil – we used that on the little plinths”). The overall effect is homely, convivial. “It’s all quite rough and natural, which makes it feel relatable,” she adds.

Adds Bourke: “The experience is very intimate, as we can only have 30 guests in the studios at any one time. We don’t have guards. We don’t have ropes or bars at the windows. Everything’s touchy-feely, and we want to preserve that.”

The shop opened for business early this year but Bourke hopes Heuman’s involvement will put what remains an under-the-radar destination more firmly on the cultural map. In homage to Brita Eldh, she is championing the role of other women at the venue. “We’ve invited female artists to exhibit in the studio museum, in dialogue with Eldh’s work, every year since 2013, and we organise a contemporary exhibition annually from May to September. It’s something we can do to scribe the history books for Carl Eldh, Brita and female artists,” she smiles.