Art & Culture in Sweden

Sweden treats art and culture as something you walk into rather than merely look at. In Stockholm the Vasa Museum holds a salvaged seventeenth-century warship raised almost whole from the harbour, while the Nationalmuseum and Moderna Museet trace the line from old masters to the contemporary. Gothenburg answers with the Konstmuseum and a working arts scene along its avenues. The country's design instinct runs deep, and it is at its most personal in the artists' homes that became museums: Carl Milles' sculpture terraces at Millesgården on Lidingö, looking out over the inlet, and Carl and Karin Larsson's house at Sundborn in Dalarna, whose light interiors helped define how Swedish homes are imagined. What ties these together is restraint and craft over spectacle. A trip built around them moves easily between grand civic galleries and intimate studio houses, and rewards travellers who want to understand a place through what it has made and chosen to keep.