Kosta Boda hotel’s lagoon-like spa pool (Photo: Klas Hjertberg) Here, I watched as skilled workers spun sugar strands of molten glass to make long stemmed glasses and chunky vases as they have done here since 1747. The next morning, I drove past snow-sodden fields dotted with wild geese to the Kingdom of Crystal.Ĭhecking into the Kosta Boda hotel, a glass-themed wonderland with crystal art works buried like sunken treasure in the bottom of its lagoon-like spa pool, I headed out to explore the home of Sweden’s oldest glassworks. Växjö with a view from the PM & Vanner roof top bar (Photo: Alexander Hall/Destination Smaland)īack in Vaxjo, I slept sweetly at Michelin star-awarded PM & Vanner, Sweden’s first gastro hotel. “Inte för allt smör i Småland!’ (not for all the butter in Smaland!),” she cried. I asked her if she’d ever spent the night here. Showing us the narrow bed where Florence died, Sophie confided that she often felt the previous owner’s presence in this room. They involved racy royalty and swindling rogues who siphoned off Florence’s money, leaving her almost penniless. “You can have Florence’s chair,” Sophie said, amused, as she seated me at the head of the table next to a headless tailor’s dummy clad in the costume of Froken’s faithful butler.Īs we enjoyed some smorgastorta, a cream cheese, smoked fish, and mustard sandwich cake, Sophie regaled us with tales of the Huseby affair.
Sophie led us into a chandelier-lit lounge gleaming with mahogany furniture. When she died in 1979, she left Huseby Bruk to the state, stipulating that the 20 spooky rooms crammed with period furnishings, elaborate costumes and curios should stay exactly as they were when she died. Florence, better known to Swedes as Froken (the Lady), inherited the house from her father in the 1940s. Leading us inside, Sophie said that Florence’s father, Joseph Stephens, who made his fortune in India when he was a young man, returned to Smaland in 1867 to buy Huseby Bruk from the previous incumbents, including the glum portraits of their aristocratic ancestors lining the walls. One of the ‘spooky’ rooms at Huseby Bruk (Photo: Destination Smaland) This is because Stephens was at the centre of the Huseby affair, a scandalous court case in the 1950s and 1960s, explained curator Sophie Magnusson. Florence Stephens, the last owner of this 19th-century manor house in the hamlet of Grimslov, is as well-known as Ikea in Sweden.
We then drove along loping roads lined with brightly painted wood frame houses to Huseby Bruk. Interactive exhibits and room sets furnished with Ikea items – Klippan sofas Lampan table lamps Billy bookcases – provided an insight into the company’s production, but less successful ventures are also showcased, including a kitchen composting sofa (discontinued because of the smell and maggots) and a line of inflatable furnishings that leaked.Ī sleek paean to the company’s design ethos, Ikea’s hotel stands opposite: there’s even a restaurant dishing up a dozen different takes on the tasty and affordable meatballs that have been served in stores since the 1980s.
An exhibit at Ikea Museum (Photo: OSKAR FALCK AB) He named what would become his home furnishing empire after his initials, IK, Elmtaryd – the farm he grew up on – and Agunnaryd, the parish. His career started when he was five, selling matches and later fish that he’d caught to help his parents during the Great Depression. This was where Ingvar Kamprad opened his first store selling affordable Swedish design in 1958,” the museum guide said, as we wandered hallways lined with photos of the store’s founder. The company certainly looms large in this remote region, which has not only the world’s only Ikea Museum, but also its first Ikea hotel.
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