Traditional Swedish red cottage (1913)
The Karlsson family posing on the porch of their new red cottage home in Hallsberg (Örebro County, Central Sweden) in 1913. My restoration and digital hand colorization of Samuel Lindskog´s image in the Örebro County Museum archive. (We only know the first name of the husband, Samuel.)
The red paint -. called the Falu red - is produced as a by-product of the Falun copper mine.
"The original red paint—bright, and almost luminescent in the afternoon sunlight—was already popular, due in part to the whimsies of the rich and royal during an architectural period known as the Brick Renaissance. Even though it wasn’t commercially manufactured until 1764, it was used as early as the 16th century. “The king of Sweden in the 1570s ordered that the castle in Stockholm and in Turku, Finland be painted red from material from the mine here,” says Nybelius. Back then, the grand Gothic brick buildings of the Netherlands were especially popular among northern European nobility. “When Sweden was a great power, we wanted our buildings to look like the bricks in Holland. But we have a lot of wood, so they just painted it to look like brick,” explains Anna Blomster, a PhD in Scandinavian studies from UCLA who wrote her thesis on Swedish red cottages. It was thus that red became a symbol of Swedish royalty, and, ironically, a nod to the pomp and grandeur of faraway kingdoms.
It was only in the early 1900s that the red paint became recognized as the archetype of Swedish country life. “We had a bad housing situation and had very high rents,” says Blomster. There was a shift to the countryside from the cities, due to a national recession that caused mass unemployment and evictions. By 1900, the rents in Stockholm were the highest in Europe. In 1904, a bill was passed to provide loans for people to build their own houses in the country. “If you were working class and sober, you could get financial aid to build your own house,” she says. “Somewhere in this process they started to talk about the red paint as the Swedish color and started to connect it to Swedishness.” In short, if you had a home and didn’t know what color to paint it, red was the recommended hue.
From then on out, the red cottage in the country has become an irreversible part of the Swedish identity—a perpetual motif on postcards, in storybooks, and in real estate agent listings. “If you ask a child to paint a house, it’s always painted red. The red house is the heart of Sweden,” says Nybelius."
(Smithsonian Magazine)
Traditional Swedish red cottage (1913)
The Karlsson family posing on the porch of their new red cottage home in Hallsberg (Örebro County, Central Sweden) in 1913. My restoration and digital hand colorization of Samuel Lindskog´s image in the Örebro County Museum archive. (We only know the first name of the husband, Samuel.)
The red paint -. called the Falu red - is produced as a by-product of the Falun copper mine.
"The original red paint—bright, and almost luminescent in the afternoon sunlight—was already popular, due in part to the whimsies of the rich and royal during an architectural period known as the Brick Renaissance. Even though it wasn’t commercially manufactured until 1764, it was used as early as the 16th century. “The king of Sweden in the 1570s ordered that the castle in Stockholm and in Turku, Finland be painted red from material from the mine here,” says Nybelius. Back then, the grand Gothic brick buildings of the Netherlands were especially popular among northern European nobility. “When Sweden was a great power, we wanted our buildings to look like the bricks in Holland. But we have a lot of wood, so they just painted it to look like brick,” explains Anna Blomster, a PhD in Scandinavian studies from UCLA who wrote her thesis on Swedish red cottages. It was thus that red became a symbol of Swedish royalty, and, ironically, a nod to the pomp and grandeur of faraway kingdoms.
It was only in the early 1900s that the red paint became recognized as the archetype of Swedish country life. “We had a bad housing situation and had very high rents,” says Blomster. There was a shift to the countryside from the cities, due to a national recession that caused mass unemployment and evictions. By 1900, the rents in Stockholm were the highest in Europe. In 1904, a bill was passed to provide loans for people to build their own houses in the country. “If you were working class and sober, you could get financial aid to build your own house,” she says. “Somewhere in this process they started to talk about the red paint as the Swedish color and started to connect it to Swedishness.” In short, if you had a home and didn’t know what color to paint it, red was the recommended hue.
From then on out, the red cottage in the country has become an irreversible part of the Swedish identity—a perpetual motif on postcards, in storybooks, and in real estate agent listings. “If you ask a child to paint a house, it’s always painted red. The red house is the heart of Sweden,” says Nybelius."
(Smithsonian Magazine)