Elevator stories
Åsa
Ingrosso
Her bedroom, made up in Juniper’s Gemstone Pink.
Åsa runs two restaurants in Palma, La Perla and OMINO, and four more in Stockholm. It is an unusual life to build a design sensibility on top of, but the two turn out to share a root: a restaurant and a bedroom are both rooms other people have to feel comfortable in, and Åsa has been reading rooms that way since she was a child, long before either business existed.
Her own bedroom, pictured here, is made up in Juniper’s Gemstone Pink, chosen the way she chooses most things: on instinct, then defended without much interest in being talked out of it.
It is also, on paper, the kind of decision she should have to explain. Pink, in a bedroom two adults share, still counts as a small risk to some people. Ask her about it and she does not defend the colour so much as report on who has actually seen it.
An unbiased opinion on Gemstone Pink.
On pink, and why it is not just a feminine colour
“One might think that pink sheets would be very girly,” she says. “But everyone who has seen them praises them, men and women alike.”
It is a small thing to notice, but it is doing real work: she is not arguing that pink is secretly gender-neutral, she is pointing at the room itself and letting it make the case. Gemstone Pink reads dustier and older than the pink people expect, closer to clay than to bubblegum, and a colour that specific stops being a statement about femininity and starts being a statement about restraint.
That is the part of the design world Åsa actually lives in, professionally, several nights a week: rooms other people form opinions about before they have even sat down. A restaurant earns the benefit of the doubt in the first ten seconds or it does not. She has simply decided her own bedroom gets held to the same standard.
An evening at home.
On three ways into a hotel-calm bedroom
Åsa’s approach centres on bringing the ease of a good boutique hotel into an ordinary room, and when pressed for specifics, she narrows an entire design philosophy down to three practical things:
- Bed-making, done precisely, every day, not just for photographs.
- A rug underneath the bed, larger than instinct suggests.
- Lighting kept low and indirect, the one most people skip.
The list is short on purpose. Most bedroom advice multiplies the number of decisions a person has to make; hers reduces it to three, all of them about restraint rather than acquisition. Nothing on it costs much. The lighting note is the one that separates a room that reads as considered from one that just reads as furnished, and it is also the one nobody photographs, which may be exactly why it is the one most people never fix.
Mallorca is my absolute paradise. I love every inch of this island.
On two worlds
She splits her time between Mallorca and Stockholm and treats them as genuinely different registers rather than one life with two addresses. Southern Europe, in her account, defaults to white with a bohemian edge, and she pushes against that default toward richer, warmer ground: terracotta, a pale blue, a soft green, colours closer to sun-bleached linen than to a paint chart, chosen because they hold up over years rather than a single season.
Stockholm asks for something closer to black and white, a Chanel-and-Parisian register that suits the pace of running four restaurants in a city built for hustle rather than for lingering. She does not try to reconcile the two cities into a single palette. She just changes registers at the airport, the way a restaurant changes its lighting between lunch and dinner service.
The photograph that almost did not make the shoot was not of the bedroom at all. It was of the dog, asleep somewhere inside the same Gemstone Pink sheets, having clearly not been consulted on the colour and having no complaints regardless.