9 Life Lessons From Nordic Style

The world has long been hungry for the Nordic lifestyle, with our love of design, nature, light and living the good life. But this is about much more than painting your floorboards white or throwing a sheepskin on a chair — it’s a mind-set that informs everyday life. The good thing is, anybody can do it, and it’s not even a question about budgets or the size of your home. Here are our nine steps to living like a Scandinavian.

1. Design for the good life. Living with design is not about trying to impress the neighbors or name-dropping about your latest designer buy. Living with design is simply living well, caring about how the things around you work, how they make you feel and how they are made. For us form follows function — we design from necessity. (Though as we all know, there is nothing stopping our designers from making functional items both funky and fab.)


2. Always buy an original. Yes, design classics can be expensive. Yes, it is easy to be lured in by the companies that sell badly produced knockoffs, thinking nobody will be able to tell the difference anyway. But there’s one thing a copied product will never do: hold its value. If you invest in a Poul Henningsen lamp like the PH3, you can enjoy it for a lifetime and still put it toward the grandchildren’s university fund. Henningsen designed his PH lamps in the late 1920s and early ’30s, and nearly a hundred years on they still look modern and stunning.


3. Love light. We all know the Nordic love of white walls and pared-back interiors, right? Of course, that’s a bit of a cliché, and there are plenty of colorful homes around, but the fact remains that we love all shades of white — perhaps in celebration of both the sunlight in summer and the deep snow in winter.

The walls of this room are absolutely perfect in regard to reflecting the light. A sloping ceiling casts light throughout the space and ends at clerestory windows that catch even the lowest rays in winter.


4. Shop and live sustainably. With large swaths of our five nations covered in forest, no wonder we use wood as a prime source of materials. From stools to saunas, everything is clad in or constructed from pine and spruce, giving interiors that typical Nordic look. But it’s also about using the materials that are close at hand and can be obtained sustainably.

As consumers, we hold enormous power in our choice of products. The smarter we shop, the better things will be. So support local firms and those that tell the story of their production process openly, and you can make little changes every day.


5. See things in black and white. You might think we are a bit middle of the road, gently diplomatic and maybe even a tad … boring? Far from it. The Nordics are nations of extremes, with deep-running currents of emotion. We have no darkness in summer and no light in winter. Opposites attract, even in our homes. Too much white in a room, and you go snow-blind. Too much black, and there is forever gloom. But the perfect balance of black lines in a white setting is pure poetry to us — like our version of interior yin and yang that works all around the world.


6. Make space for children. Kids should be both seen and heard in the Scandinavian countries, and as often and as loudly as possible. Playtime is taken very seriously indeed, from the little ones’ creations with Legos — which originated in Denmark — to the older ones’ cyberworlds in Minecraft, a video game invented in Sweden.

In this summer house in Sweden, the loft on top of the parents’ sleeping cubicle has been turned into a playpen-indoor treehouse, made secure by netting.


7. Live close to (and in) nature. While other European people flock to beaches and resorts in summer, the height of luxury for many Scandinavians on vacation is traveling to an isolated spot far from the madding crowd — perhaps with no running water or central heating, but preferably with good Wi-Fi, as our nations are some of the most connected in the world.

Our landscapes and sceneries are deeply ingrained in us, and new architecture makes good use of advances in insulation and triple glazing to create floor-to-ceiling glass walls, as in this summer house. We also like to bring nature inside, with plants in simple terra-cotta pots taking us through the months when there is not a green leaf to be seen outside.


8. Organize and declutter. We do like a bit of order and selection. After all, two Swedish words you might all know are ombudsman and smorgasbord. But it’s also about seeing everyday beauty in the simple things, and taking pleasure in a pile of well-folded towels or running a hand along a shelf of color-coordinated books. It’s something akin to mindfulness through design, and something that can be done no matter how you live or what your budget is.


9. Embrace hygge. We’ll round off this guide on how to enjoy design from the Nordics with a Danish word that encapsulates all of the steps above. Hygge means “cozy warmth” — spending time with the ones you love, in a home that is filled with light and well-loved items that fill you with everyday joy when you use them. You can’t buy hygge, nor can you get someone to create it for you. It is the Nordic state of contentment that can be found only at home.

Come see more about the Nordic lifestyle and Nordic design and architecture at Houzz.dk and Houzz.se.
Velkommen and välkommen!

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