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Noon Here Looks Like Evening: Ett Hem, Stockholm

  • laura1cortesi
  • 2 hours ago
  • 8 min read

The Arrival

The taxi turns off Karlavägen and the city stops behaving like a city. The streets start to bend, and they bend on purpose: Per Olof Hallman laid this district out from 1907 on Camillo Sitte's principle that town planning is closer to composing music than to drawing a grid, and he left the granite hill underneath exactly where it was. So you climb. Dark brick, verdigris copper gone soft green, leaded glass, oriel windows leaning out over a pavement with nobody on it. Four blocks named after larks. A church at the top that you will notice later.


Then a door at Sköldungagatan 2 with no sign on it. Ett Hem does not have a sign, and it does not have a reception desk either, which you discover when somebody takes your coat in a hallway while you are still looking for the place where you are supposed to check in. There isn't one. The house was built in 1910 for a civil servant and his wife, and the whole proposition here is that it has never entirely stopped being their house. You will be offered coffee before you are offered a key.


The Light at Ett Hem


Ett Hem sits at 59.3456 degrees north, 18.0677 east. That number is the whole story, and it is a story with no middle.


On 21 June the sun rises at 03:31 at an azimuth of 37 degrees (northeast) and sets at 22:07 at 323 degrees (northwest): eighteen hours and thirty six minutes of daylight. At midnight it is still only 7.1 degrees below the horizon, so blue hour in June is not an hour, it is the entire night. The catch is the middle. Solar noon puts the sun at 54 degrees, flat and punishing, for nine or ten hours. June hands you two magnificent golden hours at times when you are asleep or at dinner, and nothing much between them.


On 21 December the sun rises at 08:44 at 139 degrees and sets at 14:47 at 221 degrees. Six hours and three minutes, and at its highest point (11:45) it is 7.3 degrees up, lower than the roofline opposite. There is no overhead light in a Stockholm December. The whole short day is one long golden hour running straight into one long blue hour.


Invert this Journal's Italian posts. In Positano the sun arrives late and leaves early because a ridge is in the way. Here nothing is in the way, and the sun itself is the problem: far too much, or almost none.


Best: mid September to late October, noon around 31 degrees, sunset at a civilised hour, birches turning. Worst: late June at midday, and any overcast week in November, when six hours of daylight and a low grey ceiling cancel each other out completely.


What It Is


An Arts and Crafts townhouse of 1910 by the architect Fredrik Dahlberg, built as a private home, opened as a hotel in 2012 by Jeanette Mix. Interiors by Ilse Crawford of Studioilse, who has stayed involved since the beginning rather than leaving after the launch photographs. It started with a handful of rooms. A decade later Ett Hem took the neighbouring townhouse at number 4, adding ten more, then number 6, which holds residences and a gym. Counting the residences, the house now runs to between 22 and 25 rooms across three buildings.


There is a kitchen you can walk into, a library, a glazed conservatory, a walled courtyard garden, and a sauna and hammam in the basement. There is an honesty bar and no minibar, no menu in the usual sense, and no lobby. It is listed in the MICHELIN Guide hotel selection. Published entry rates vary widely by season and channel, from roughly EUR 455 to about SEK 7,500 a night.


The Room at Ett Hem


The Attic Suite is the one to want, and not only for the size: it carries hand painted decoration by Filip Månsson, the same decorative painter who worked at Sköldungagatan 9 four doors up the street (now the Swiss embassy). The painting is not a hotel flourish, it is a Lärkstaden habit, which puts you inside the district's own decorative programme rather than a designer's reference to it.


Below that the calculation changes. The park facing doubles are genuinely quiet and genuinely small. The entry level rooms are small without the compensation, and here you are paying for the house rather than the square metres: the kitchen, the library, the garden, the cake somebody bakes every afternoon. If you will spend your days out and your evenings downstairs, the smallest category is the honest buy. If you want to work in your own room, go up two grades.


What the press photography overstates is window light. Those interiors are shot in June, when eighteen hours of sun finds every window eventually. The rooms are deliberately dark toned, lamp lit and low contrast, which is right for this latitude and wrong for your phone camera in January.


The Guide


Eat

  • The kitchen at Ett Hem. No printed menu. You say roughly when you want to eat and roughly what you feel like, and it appears. Worth doing at least once, and better at the kitchen table than in the conservatory.

  • Ekstedt, Humlegårdsgatan 17. Everything cooked over fire, wood smoke and embers, no electricity in the kitchen. MICHELIN listed, about fifteen minutes on foot.

  • Nour, Norrlandsgatan 24. The most technically ambitious cooking within an easy walk, and the counter seats are the ones to book.

  • Östermalms Saluhall, Östermalmstorg. The 1888 brick market hall, reopened in 2020 after a long restoration. Lunch at a counter, not a sit down dinner.

  • Rosendals Trädgård, Djurgården. A biodynamic market garden with a bakery and a café inside the greenhouses. This is the one to do without the hotel: go at 09:00, eat under glass, and walk back along the water.


Do

  • Engelbrektskyrkan, three minutes uphill. Lars Israel Wahlman, 1910 to 1914, exactly contemporary with the house you are sleeping in, built straight onto the bare rock at the top of the district. Its nave is 32 metres, the tallest in Scandinavia. Twenty minutes inside, and best on a bright winter morning when the low sun sits below the high windows.

  • Stockholm Public Library, Sveavägen. Gunnar Asplund, 1928. The rotunda is one of the great rooms in Europe and it is free. Go at opening, especially in winter.

  • Skogskyrkogården, twenty minutes on the green line. Asplund and Lewerentz, on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1994. This one costs you half a day and earns it, but only in October: pine trunks, low sun, mist off the grass. In midsummer glare it is much less than it should be.


Wander

Walk Lärkstaden itself with nowhere to go. Sköldungagatan into Baldersgatan into Friggagatan, the same four blocks twice, in the hour before sunset. Hallman's curves mean the view closes ahead of you every fifty metres and then opens again, which is the whole point of the plan and is invisible on a map. In October that hour starts around 17:00. In December it starts at 13:30 and is over before you have finished.



The Frame


Not the facade. In the first half of December, be on the rock terrace beside Engelbrektskyrkan at 13:45 on a clear day. The sun will be at 4 degrees of altitude and 208 degrees of azimuth, so put it behind your left shoulder and shoot northwest, down over the roofs of Lärkstaden, with Ett Hem 250 metres away in the middle distance. At that angle the light reaches only the copper ridges and the top two courses of brick. Everything below the second floor stays in flat blue shade. You get about twenty five minutes. Every other photographer is on the other side, pointing a lens up at the church tower.


Practically

  • Season. Late September to late October, comfortably first. Late May to mid June if you want a city with no darkness in it, accepting a flat middle of the day. January and February reward anyone who can work with six hours of very low sun and will punish anyone who cannot.

  • Price band. Published starting rates run from about EUR 455 to roughly SEK 7,500 (about EUR 660) depending on season and booking channel. Suites considerably more.

  • Getting there. Arlanda Express to Stockholm City in about twenty minutes, then ten minutes by taxi. Metro Stadion or Tekniska Högskolan, both a short walk. Do not hire a car.

  • Who it suits. Design travellers, solo travellers who will happily eat at a shared kitchen table, anyone photographing Nordic autumn light, and people who would rather stay in a house than a hotel.

  • Who it does not. Anyone who wants a pool, a spa floor, a concierge desk, a water view, or floor area for the money. Also anyone booking a first ever trip to Stockholm: the city's great sights are elsewhere, and Lärkstaden's virtue is precisely that nothing happens in it.


Questions


Is Ett Hem worth it? For the Attic Suite or an upper category room in late September or October, yes. You are buying a house, an unusually good kitchen and the quietest square kilometre in central Stockholm. For the smallest room at a peak summer rate, it is a harder case: you would get more floor area for the money almost anywhere else in Östermalm, and midsummer is the weakest light of the year here.


Where is Ett Hem in Stockholm? Sköldungagatan 2, in Lärkstaden, a four block garden city enclave in northern Östermalm laid out by Per Olof Hallman from 1907. It is 250 metres from Engelbrektskyrkan and about ten minutes on foot from Stureplan.


Does Ett Hem have a restaurant? It has a kitchen rather than a restaurant. There is no fixed menu: you agree a time and the chefs cook. You can eat at the kitchen table, in the conservatory or in the garden, and non residents can book.


How many rooms does Ett Hem have? Around 22 to 25, spread across three adjoining townhouses at Sköldungagatan 2, 4 and 6. It opened in 2012 with far fewer and expanded into number 4 a decade later.


What is the best month to photograph Stockholm? October, then late September. Sunset falls at a civilised hour, the noon sun sits around 22 to 31 degrees instead of 54, the birches turn, and the city is empty. June gives you spectacular light at 03:30 and 22:00 and almost nothing usable in between. October is the answer on the Mediterranean too, for different reasons: see Casa Angelina, Praiano.


Sources


Images

  • Snowy Stockholm street (cover). Photograph by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash. Unsplash License.

  • Winter light on Stockholm buildings above the ice. Photograph by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash. Unsplash License.

  • Summer evening above Stockholm. Photograph by Hanlin Sun on Unsplash. Unsplash License.

  • A row of Stockholm facades in warm light. Photograph by Ellen Melin on Unsplash. Unsplash License.

  • Winter walk in a Stockholm neighbourhood. Photograph by Khrystyna Barabanova on Pexels. Pexels License.

 
 
 

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