Elevator stories
Sanna
Flygare
The moodboard for Project J: wood and sand, with a hint of green and blue.
Sanna spent fifteen years as a textile engineer inside the fashion industry before interior design became anything more than an instinct she used on her own house. Renovating her own home is what did it. Friends started asking for her help soon after, and the request kept repeating itself until it stopped being a favour and started being a question worth answering properly.
She began studying remotely during her first parental leave, five years ago, alongside a newborn and whatever hours were left over. Studio Flygare followed four years ago, though by her own account it took another three years before she committed to it fully: only since last year has she worked exclusively with interior design clients, no longer splitting the week with anything else.
Right now the studio’s attention is on a bedroom for a young girl, a project she has named “Project J,” the moodboard for which is pictured here.
Nature is an important source of inspiration, especially when it comes to the colour palette. Travelling and visiting different hotels are also so inspiring, and I always come home with my phone full of pictures of various details.
On working from a moodboard
“A moodboard describes the feeling, materials and colours,” she says. “I usually start by identifying the big elements, accent colours, dark or light wood, and then work with different shades from there, so it does not end up too flat.”
Project J’s board reads exactly that way once you know to look for it: wood and sand carrying most of the weight, then small, deliberate interruptions of green and blue keeping the palette from settling into beige. Nothing on it is a mood in the abstract sense, a feeling with no material attached to it. Every colour is already sitting on a specific surface, a tile, a thread, a painted door, which is the difference between a moodboard that inspires a room and one that just describes a colour scheme.
Sanna and Mathilda, over swatches for Project J.
On balancing two languages in one bedroom
Her method for reconciling Scandinavian restraint with Southern European warmth is less a compromise than a division of labour: keep the whitewashed walls and the wood floor a Scandinavian room already wants, then let the colour do the travelling, terracotta, blue, green, yellow, pulled from a sandy beach rather than a paint deck. If a client wants the classic patterned tile too, her only real rule is to keep it inside the same palette, so it reads as one more texture rather than a competing idea.
The materials she keeps returning to are terracotta and wood for exactly this reason: terracotta and tones like blue and green are calming almost by consensus, and wood is the one material Scandinavian and Southern European interiors were never going to disagree about. Put the two together and the warmth arrives without the room ever raising its voice.
Bedding gets the most conservative treatment of anything in her rooms, deliberately: a solid, light colour, not necessarily white, chosen to sit inside the palette rather than announce itself, on the theory that good bedding is worth buying for years rather than for a season. It is the one surface in the room she is least interested in making a statement with.
Project J, in the end, is for someone close to home: a bedroom for Juniper’s own founder, for her eldest daughter, currently mid-renovation, with Sanna’s crew somewhere in the house making the usual mess a project makes before it starts looking like anything. The moodboard is the calm part. The rest, as anyone who has renovated a room a child will grow up in already knows, rarely stays that calm for long.