Built to age: how Wingårdhs designed the Strand Hotel to outlast its own opening

Hotel interiors

Reading time: 9 min

Leila Atlassi of Wingårdhs set herself an unusually testable brief at the Strand Hotel. She wanted something durable, not a concept needing replacement every three years. Eight years on, that claim can be checked, and the answer is in what has changed and what has not.

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The Strand Hotel opened on Nybrokajen in 1912, in time for the Stockholm Olympic Games, in a brick building with a corner tower looking across Nybroviken toward Strandvägen and the Royal Dramatic Theatre. Its architect was Ludvig Peterson, who lived from 1853 to 1931. The land it stands on is where the warship Vasa was built in 1620.

Between roughly 2016 and 2018 the whole hotel was rebuilt internally by Wingårdhs, the Swedish practice, with Leila Atlassi as interior architect and project lead. The work ran to a reported 150 million Swedish kronor and covered 170 rooms and suites, the lobby, four meeting rooms, the restaurant and the bars. In March 2018 the hotel became one of the nine brand-led founding properties of Radisson Collection, which launched that month with fourteen hotels.

Most coverage of the project describes the finishes. The more interesting thing is the brief Atlassi set herself, and the fact that enough time has now passed to mark it.

A building inside a building

Atlassi’s own account of the approach is unusually direct. “We constructed an inside building,” she has said, and the aim was “something durable, not a concept that would need updating every three years.”

That is a specific position, and it has consequences for every subsequent decision. A hotel interior designed around a look has a natural half-life, because the look dates and the room has to be redone. A hotel interior designed around materials that improve with wear does not, because the thing that would normally read as ageing reads instead as patina.

The work was done in two phases. The ground floor came first, completing in 2017: a new restaurant, a large central bar with a smaller corner bar aimed at people who live nearby rather than guests, and a new entrance opening toward Berzelii Park. That phase also unified two previously separate sections of the building, which had grown apart over a century that included a 1930s extension. The full hotel followed in 2018.

One practical detail from the process is worth recording because it is so common and so rarely admitted. The original architectural drawings were outdated and incomplete, so a good deal of the work had to be resolved on site rather than on paper. Anyone who has worked on a building of this age will recognise that immediately.

Atlassi’s stated principle for the relationship between old and new is worth quoting in full: “We believe in creating a dynamic experience by amplifying the building’s own character,” and separately, “We wanted the new elements to be a distinctive addition to the original appearance.” Not a pastiche and not a contrast. An addition that declares itself.

One grey, everywhere

The through-line is a colour. Wingårdhs mixed a bespoke grey for the project, Strand Grey, strandgrå, with a hint of purple in it, and used it as the base wall tone throughout the hotel.

The brief for that colour is the best short explanation of the whole scheme: it had to be a tone that felt right late at night and was still bright enough for a breakfast conversation. A hotel is two completely different rooms depending on the hour, one lit by low lamps and one by Baltic morning light off water. Finding a single grey that holds in both is a harder problem than using two, and solving it once means the hotel reads as one place all day.

Against that base, the accent colours were pulled from outside the windows: blue, red, yellow and green, taken from the water of Nybroviken, the rooflines and the surrounding buildings. And the window frames themselves were painted white, deliberately, so that each opening reads as a frame around the view of Strandvägen and the water.

That last move is the most economical idea in the hotel. In a building whose greatest asset is what is outside it, painting the frames white and the walls a restrained grey turns the view into the artwork on every wall, at no cost.

Materials chosen to patinate

The material specification follows directly from the durability brief.

The core palette is oak, walnut, stone, leather and metal, used in their natural colours, with concrete in the mix. The ground-floor phase was specified as oiled wood, natural stone, through-coloured plaster and patinated metals, and the reason given was longevity. Flooring includes black and white patterned marble, with Carrara in the mix, and continuous timber running through the lobby. The meeting rooms are lined in walnut.

Every one of those choices is a material that ages rather than fails. Oiled timber can be re-oiled. Through-coloured plaster does not reveal a different colour when it chips, because there is no different colour underneath. Patinated metal is already doing the thing that would otherwise be called tarnishing. Natural stone gets better under foot traffic. This is a specification written by someone thinking about year twelve.

The same logic governed what was kept. Existing doors and floors were retained and refinished rather than replaced, which is both the sustainable choice and the one that preserves the building’s own hand. The hotel holds Green Key certification.

Atlassi’s summary of the palette is characteristically plain: “To create a warm and welcoming atmosphere, the interior tonality has been set from natural materials like stone, wood, leather and metal in their natural colours.”

The furniture is Danish and Italian

Here is the fact about this hotel that nobody has made anything of.

A 1912 Swedish landmark, renovated by a Swedish practice, for a group headquartered in the region, is furnished substantially in Danish and Italian design. The verified specification includes Fritz Hansen, among them the Swan chair by Arne Jacobsen; Gubi; and Flos, including the 2097 chandelier by Gino Sarfatti.

That is a choice about quality and longevity rather than about nationality, and it is entirely consistent with the rest of the brief. The Swan went into production in 1958 and has never left it. Sarfatti’s 2097 dates from the same year. Specifying two pieces that have been made continuously for close to seventy years is the furniture equivalent of through-coloured plaster: you are buying the version of the thing that has already proved it lasts.

There is a further layer. Some of the Fritz Hansen pieces in the hotel are heritage items relocated from sister Radisson properties, rather than newly bought. Which properties has not been published, and it is worth finding out, because Radisson Collection’s Copenhagen hotel is Arne Jacobsen’s SAS Royal of 1960, the building the Swan and the Egg were designed for. If any of the Strand’s Fritz Hansen came from there, it is one of the better stories in European hotel design and it is sitting unwritten.

The rooms

The guest rooms are where the custom joinery lives. Bed frames, tables, television cabinets, wardrobes and minibar units were all designed for the project, in oak and walnut, with light wood finishes deliberately avoided in favour of darker tones. Bedding is bright white against that warmth. Upholstery in the brasserie runs to soft velvet.

There are 19 suites in four categories: one Tower Suite, one Sea Salon, four Presidential Suites with sea views, and thirteen Junior Suites, seven facing the water and six the city. The Tower Suite occupies the top of the building with a private roof terrace and was created in 1984. A time capsule was placed in it in 2012, the hotel’s centenary. The Sea Salon has a circular bedroom facing the Royal Dramatic Theatre.

The building’s guest list is part of the fabric. Greta Garbo, Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot all stayed. Ingrid Bergman habitually took room 607, for the view of the Royal Dramatic Theatre and of her childhood home. ABBA shot an album cover at the hotel in 1979. In the late 1960s the building housed Alexandra’s, described as Sweden’s first international nightclub, and the rear of the hotel had earlier been a theatre club frequented by Garbo, Lars Hanson and Gösta Ekman.

A night sky indoors

The single most photographed element is in the restaurant atrium: a suspended installation of hundreds of individual light elements, hung through a double-height volume and reading as a night sky.

It is a well-judged piece of scale management. A double-height atrium in a hotel is a difficult room, because it is tall enough to feel civic and small enough to need intimacy at table height. Filling the upper volume with many small points of light rather than one large fitting gives the room its ceiling back without lowering it, and it puts the visual interest where the space is otherwise empty.

Art in the hotel came through a partnership with Young Art, commissioning emerging Swedish artists and designers for the lobby, event spaces, guest rooms and dining areas. There is a herb garden on the roof supplying the kitchen.

What eight years have shown

The durability claim can now be tested, and the result is clear.

The rooms and the public interiors are as Wingårdhs left them. What has changed is the food and beverage offer, which has been rebranded and re-tenanted. The ground-floor restaurant now trades as Strand Stockholm under chef Tim Waage, with the hotel’s food and beverage run by the Kasai Group, and a rooftop bar, Bar Charles, opened on the tenth floor in summer 2025, running seasonally and returning in spring 2026. The 2018 configuration, a brasserie called The Strand with 200 covers under chef Richard Williamson, has moved on.

That is exactly the split you would want. Restaurant brands turn over every few years everywhere in the world, because that is the nature of the business. The architecture underneath them does not have to. A hotel interior that can absorb two changes of restaurant identity without being touched is a hotel interior that was designed correctly.

Wingårdhs, meanwhile, also did the rooms at Blique by Nobis, which occupies a Sigurd Lewerentz industrial building elsewhere in Stockholm. A 1912 brick Olympic hotel and a Lewerentz warehouse is a considerable range for one practice in one city.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The Strand is a useful case study because its designer stated a testable ambition and then specified accordingly. Through-coloured plaster, oiled timber, patinated metal, retained doors, a single bespoke grey and two pieces that have been in production since 1958 are not separate decisions. They are one decision, applied consistently, and the evidence that it worked is that eight years and two restaurant identities later nobody has needed to touch the rooms.

The loose end is the furniture provenance. Somebody in the group knows which sister hotels the heritage Fritz Hansen pieces came from, and if the answer involves Jacobsen’s own building in Copenhagen, that is a far better story than any of the ones told at the opening.