Designed and built between 1918 and 1928, Stockholm Public Library is a rotunda library building, designed by Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund who spent a few years researching in Europe and US. Its stark Nordic Classicist composition uses the simple geometry of a cylinder intersecting a cubic base. Built from investigation project with a budget of two million SEK, Stockholm City library became the major work for Gunnar Asplund.

One of the most notable buildings in Stockholm, it is a simple composition of a cube and a tube. The tube is rising in the centre and creates a monumental appearance. Interior reading rooms form a square with an open courtyard in the center of the library, which is almost entirely filled by a round lending hall. In fact it was Sweden’s first public library to apply the principle of open shelves. The combination of spherical and cubic forms was a frequent motif, which can be found in both Asplund’s earlier projects and those of his contemporaries.

Grand Hotel Stockholm is a five-star hotel located on the waterfront opposite the Royal Palace and the Old Town and next to the Nationalmuseum. Founded by Frenchman Jean-François Régis Cadier in 1872, this is one of Scandinavia’s leading luxury hotels. Rich in history and tradition, the more than 130 year old Grand Hotel Stockholm occupies prime position and offers high-classes services to its guests. It is an excellent starting point to those who want to discover this magnificent city.

Grand Hotel offers 326 stylishly decorated rooms and 42 elegant suites. Each of them provides guest with modern amenities including air-conditions, LCD TVs with satellite channels, high-speed Internet access, comfortable bedding, private bathrooms with complimentary toiletries. Featuring panoramic views over Stockholm and individually designed, each room has its own distinctive character and colorful history.

The hotel is the only Swedish member of The Leading Hotels of the World and the only InterContinental hotel in Scandinavia. When staying at the Grand Hotel Stockholm, guests will enjoy a wide range of services and amenities. The hotel has 35 banquet and conference rooms, two restaurants, a bar and health club. One of the restaurants has two Michelin stars and offers city views but the spa center boasts exercise equipment, an indoor pool and spa treatments such as facials, foot massages and naprapathy.

Situated in Orust Kommun, Goteborgs och Bohus Lan, Gullholmen is one of the many pretty and picturesque islands on Sweden’s west coast. It isn’t a particularly popular destination within Sweden, but it does receive a few travellers, most of whom make a brief stop to see the Island Called Gullholmen. Generally, travellers visiting the area stick to the more well-known places such as Goteborg. The village Gullholmen is situated on two main islands; the relatively huge Horman and the tiny Gullholmen.

Gullholmen is packed with houses, but Horman, on the other hand, is largely a national reserve and the vast areas of cliffs, rocks and bushes suppressed by the harsh, cold winter winds makes for great walks. It is the most confined town of whole Sweden. Cars and bicycles are prohibited, but you can go by a ferry from and to the road located on “the mainland”, well it is not the mainland, but whatever… Anyway, although only 148 inhabitants live here, there is a local supermarket… Enjoy your stay.

The Albert Kokl & Konferens Hotel is utterly set for both job and leisure guests to Trollhattan. The Albert Kokl & Konferens Hotel boasts a favourable emplacement with recent livelihood in every guestroom and superb mating.

Apiece guestroom is tastefully prescribed with non breathing flat, whisker drier, telly, change rain and tub, satellite/cable TV. The base sustenance provided at this Trollhattan improvement comprise lift, bar/pub, laundry service/dry cleansing, restaurant, reside copulate, line object.
 

Guests staying at this Trollhattan improvement can revel a comfortable potentiality of hotel facilities specified as lift, bar/pub, laundry service/dry cleaning, edifice, position force, performing confection. Hotel’s guests can participate on-site last leisure and sports facilities much as golf course (on place), garden.

Restaurant Albert is a member of Euro-Toques Outside and mentioned in the Someone Draw. Guests can decide from a omnifarious seasonal list supported on locally sourced ingredients. The building has a bar and a well-stocked wine cellar. Meals can be appropriated on the render.

Radisson Blu Plaza hotel has 673 new renovated rooms. The hotel rooms offer everything you need for a comfortable stay in Oslo. Featuring a bold Scandinavian decor and Jensen beds, all rooms have satellite TV, wireless Internet, coffee and tea provisions, mini bars, in room safe, and air conditioning. Rooms on higher floors offer views over the city or the Oslofjord. All guestrooms are non-smoking and guest rooms specially equipped for disabled guests are available upon request. With stunning city views, the 34th floor of Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel, has a Mediterranean restaurant, tapas bar, fitness centre and swimming pool. A health and fitness centre offers a gymnasium, sauna and swimming pool. Offering Southern European and North African specialties a Mediterranean restaurant and “34″Plaza Skybar at the 34th floor welcome you a relaxed atmosphere and breathtaking views of the city. Plaza Panorama at the 33rd floor is perfectly suited for meetings, receptions, cocktail parties, dinners, weddings or anniversaries.

Opening for the 1912 Olympics, the Radisson Blu Strand Hotel is located in the heart of Stockholm’s theater district. There are many great attractions nearby, such as National Museum, Royal Swedish Opera, Museum of Medieval Stockholm and Stockholm Palace. Offering stunning views of the bay of Nybroviken, this city centre hotel is a perfect base from which to explore the Old Town and modern shopping districts.

The classically designed Radisson Blu Strand Hotel offers 152 stylish rooms with a unique mix of modern and historic decor. Each one comes with desirable amenities, such as air conditioning, in-room safes, complimentary wireless Internet access, tea/coffee makers, satellite television, mini bars, and stylish bathrooms. Make the most of your trip, whether for business or pleasure! This Stockholm hotel provides fine dining in a relaxing setting at the Strand Restaurant and Lounge. It uses the highest quality ingredients in its modern Swedish and international dishes. The Radisson Blu Strand Hotel also includes eight modern meeting rooms, as well as a top-floor sauna and small gymnasium. Other amenities include laundry facilities, dry cleaning/laundry services, 24-hour room service, complimentary newspapers in the lobby, a concierge desk and currency exchange.

In the forest in the tiny village of Harads, in municipality of Boden, far north of Sweden, one stunning tree hotel is located. Designed by Inredningsgruppen it resembles – what else – a bird’s nest. The hotel combine innovative modern design with ecological thinking in order to find new ways of valuing the vast Swedish forest. Opened in July, 2010, the Bird’s Nest consists of only six “rooms” each designed by a different architect to be completely unique. Each independent of the others, six different nests, each with its distinctive feature and its architecture.

Kungliga Djurgarden (Royal Djurgarden) is an island consisting mainly of parkland and forest, with enough to see to keep visitors busy for several days. A wonderful walk along Djurgardskanalen during the summer will get you to Skansen, for instance, an open-air museum presenting historical Sweden, and Vasamuseet(the Vasa Museum), featuring the warship Vasa, which sank in Stockholm on her maiden voyage in 1628. Younger visitors will love Junibacken with its storybook worlds of iconic Swedish children’s author, Astrid Lindgren. Thielska Galleriet (the Thielska Gallery) and Prince Eugen’s Prince Eugen’s Waldermarsudde are two outstanding art museums, housed in former private palaces and famous for their collections of Scandinavian paintings and sculptures from the period around 1900.

The Jewish Theatre is a true gem in the small, exclusive scale. The imposing Nordiska museet(the Nordic Museum), mistaken by some visitors for the Royal Palace, is a leading international museum for Scandinavian culture and history. The island of Djurgarden is home to many other museums and historical buildings, making it a particularly diverse destination for both body and soul.

The couple, a German and a Swede, respectively, got degrees in biology (Krynitz) and forestry (Strotz), traveled, studied some more, taught, designed, and then, in 1993, bought a farm. And only naturally, very organically, did that farm develop into Urnatur Skogseremitage, an eco-reserve in green parlance, a summer camp for grown-ups in realspeak. Three hours southwest of Stockholm on small Lake Visjo, Urnatur is like a demonstration model for the live-smart movement and a destination for those who wish to not so much turn back the clock as to slow it way down.

In a place named for a Swedish phrase that means both “ancient nature” and “made from nature,” everything that’s in the woods is of the woods. From storm-felled trees, Strotz hand-built one main cabin, six guest cabins, two tree houses, and a bathhouse—the only structure with both electricity (solar-powered) and plumbing. (Strotz read the bibles of the American back-to-the-land movement, the Foxfire books from the 1970’s, which inspired much of his craft and woodsmanship.)

Three of the cabins have roofs of peat and moss that spawn wild strawberries in late summer, and meld into a forest carpeted in plush, intense green. At Urnatur, nature and design dovetail seamlessly. Pulling from Swedish, Amish, Shaker, Russian, and Japanese traditions, each cabin is unique but uniformly enticing. You will want to stay in them all.  Just a 10-minute walk from the cabins, along a path bordered by pastures for Swedish heritage breeds of cows and sheep, brought me to the lake. There, inside the “tin castle,” a metal-roof building that’s the largest at Urnatur, or on its deck, guests gather for conversation, a glass of wine, and Krynitz’s fine meals, their ingredients pulled mostly from the farm.

Urnatur is all fresh smells and new experiences and no rules. If you want crayfish for dinner, you can row out on the lake and check the traps with Strotz. Herbal tea? Forage on the grounds with Krynitz. When the sky finally darkens, you light your way with lanterns, your cabin with candles and kerosene lamps. After all, Strotz says, “What is more beautiful: a lightbulb or a burning candle?”When you want to bake in the sauna or stargaze from the hot tub, both part of the immaculate bathhouse, you advise Strotz, who stokes the fires that heat them.

Krynitz and Strotz’s knowledge of carpentry and blacksmithing is astonishing. Plant material and food and cooking, of animal husbandry, of Swedish history and lore, of current events and contemporary design, and simply of people. Not just the creators and caretakers of Urnatur, they are its soul, making it a paradigm impossible not to want to emulate, impossible to replicate.

Fabriken Furillen, is a small eco hotel that opened in 2000 and expanded for the better part of the next decade. The brief flight from Stockholm descended into fog at little Visby Airport. Then the 45-minute drive to Furillen a wiper-whipping swim along narrow roads until it slowly lightened to a mist. Furillen is itself an islet in the Baltic Sea off the northeastern coast of Gotland. Unlike Faro, the island just to the north that Ingmar Bergman long called home, a ferry ride isn’t required to get there. Craggy limestone formations loomed to the side of the road like tipsy sentries. Just before dipping to sea level and reaching the causeway to Furillen, the road traversed odd, empty, unnatural pools—as if a giant had taken an ice cream scoop to the earth, the flavor of the day being cement.

Everyting about Furillen is little wierd! What kind of person would look at an old cement factory (fabriken) operating out of a limestone quarry, dormant for some 30 years, and see the bones of a hotel? It would have to be someone as visionary as a photographer used to conceptualizing and improvising while on assignment in exotic locations. Tired of being on the road much of the year, away from family, Johan Hellstrom moved permanently to Furillen in 1999, first renovating the factory with his wife, Anna-Karin, as a studio before expanding it into a hotel. The idea was to promote the factory as much as a location for photo shoots as an unusual escape.

At Fabriken, the visual trumps all else. Heavy chains still hang from the ceiling of the former workers’ canteen; they’re no longer used, except as a super-scale necklace-like adornment. Large single-pane windows in the dining room frame a Charles Sheeleresque image of a hulking concrete tower next to a gargantuan heap of slag. There is a rugged, surreal, even romantic allure to the setting that the overcast sky only abetted, allowing all the subtle shades of gray to emerge. Like sound carrying across water, a woman in a bright orange jacket could be seen in the fog, sharp as a spark, way down the beach. One can only imagine the scenes Bergman, were he still filming, could have produced here.

Locally sourced sheepskin rugs and handcrafted Midcentury furniture give the seemingly spare six cabins an alluring warmth, while Bang & Olufsen stereos and flat-screen TV’s lend the 15 rooms in the main house a modern edge. Fabriken Furillen is so unusual a place, one of such brutal beauty, that despite its faults, it will stay with you far longer than you will stay with it.

If there are 2 things Swedes love doing, these are hanging out in the sun and drinking beer. OK, maybe they like other things too! So, when the snow melts and the first sun rays feel lightly warm, you can see all the parks in Stockholm filling up. Vitabergsparken is clearly not an exception.

People go there from all over town to hang out in the sun, relax, have a picnic, make out, read a book, barbecue, listen and share music, see and be seen and drink wine or beer! Everything is doable at Vitan. The crowd is usually young and it’s also the natural habitat for the Stockholm hipster during the daylight.

Some of the people also prefer to grab a newspaper or a book or a friend or an ice cream at Nytorget just before hitting for the hill. In fact, if you are looking for something a bit calmer, just stay at the less flashy Nytorget, typically frequented by families. Unfortunately sun disappears faster than on the white hill. Ah, I almost forgot saying that Vitabergsparken is located above the house level and turned south but then again, is there anyone going there for the sun only?

Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm is pure joy for photo lovers. Opened in may last year with the top name Annie Leibovitz. It was a big success, no doubt about it. They have pretty many exhibitions every year, so far you won’t be disappointed. Fotografiska strive to be a vital centre for contemporary photography. The ambition is to exhibit world-renown photographers, many of who have never shown in Sweden. Located in the heart of Stockholm, the museum has an exhibition space of 2 500 square meters, and will feature 4 major exhibitions per year and approximately 15 – 20 minor exhibitions.

Fotografiska is housed in a former industrial Art Nouveau style building dating from 1906. Designed by Ferdinand Boberg, the building was used for the customscontrol of goods, and is listed as a building of cultural interest. The original brickfacade of the beautiful customsbuilding is intact, while the interiors have been renovated to house the museum.

The city of Stockholm has funded the 250 million crown restoration costs. In addition to the exhibition spaces, of 5 500 square meters, Fotografiska houses an academy, bistro, cafe, bar, conference rooms, museum shop, gallery, and event spaces.

Fotografiska is beautifully situated in Slussen, just by the water with a nice view over Skeppsholmen and Djurgarden. It has really generous opening hours – everyday from 10:00 to 21:00! More museums should have these kind of opening hours! Perfect for some inspiring exhibitions before going out…I adore the premiere exhibitions. Lennart Nilsson’s “A child is born” was really impressive and has nostalgic emotions. Leibovitz’s “A photographer’s life” was also impressive, beautiful, startstruck, melancholic and very personal. Speer’s “The birthday party” was beautiful and Joel-Peter Witkin’s “Bodies” was uncomfortable, disgusting and absolutely beautiful.

This is a new congress center placed in Stockholm, Sweden. The building is located next to The Central Station and along the Riddarfjärden Bay.It is just between the historic city zone and the dynamic and contemporary business area.

Designed by White Arkitekter the building includes a conference hall, office building and luxury hotel.It is splited in three varying properties, the facility features a combination of intersecting volumes that slowly expand beyond the confines of the site.

images courtesy of white arkitekter

Lund Konsthall Museum is a result of a donation from the Old Savings’ Bank (today’s Finn Savings’ Bank) to the City of Lund, Sweden. In 1953 the City Council decided to accept the gift and invited six architects for a competition to design the new kunsthalle. Lund Konsthall has not fully retained its original architectural expression, but it has escaped thorough reconstruction. In 2004 it underwent a lighter renovation, aiming at restoring as much as possible of the original architecture. 

Lund Konsthall is also part of a lively regional context. The bridge between Denmark and southern Sweden constructed in 2000 has created a dynamic and future-orientated region. Lund is a knowledge city, home to Scandinavia’s largest university. The concentration of highly educated inhabitants makes Lund an interesting environment for exhibiting contemporary art.

Lund Konsthall is also a significant international contemporary art venue, achieved with exhibitions and other events of high international standard, featuring art from the nearby region as well as from the rest of the world. Lund Konsthall also offer a programme that is distinct and accessible to existing and new groups of visitors. The creation of meaning through the visual and spatial articulation of exhibitions, free-distribution printed matter with clearly formulated presentation texts, more substantial catalogues, public talks, lectures and moderated discussion events.

However exhibitions and education programmes are the main activities, and the institution also have the capacity for production and research. Lund Konsthall is responsible for the production of public art when the City of Lund commissions new buildings or renovate existing buildings. Artists’ talks are often organised in connection with exhibition openings, to give the audience an opportunity to encounter the exhibiting artists and their thinking.