Castle on a cloud
CUTTING-EDGE ART TRIUMPHS IN ITS INCONGRUITY AT A MEDIEVAL CASTLE ON A SWEDISH ESTATE.
High on the gable wall of an old barn on Wanås Estate in southern Sweden are two intersecting clocks. They look like mirror images; the right one tells the time and the left one goes backwards. It’s an artwork by Esther Shalev-Gerz called Les Inséparables — a conjoined pair linking the past with the future. They’re a fitting symbol for Wanås (pronounced ‘ Vanoos’), a 15th-century farming and forestry property with a history of art collecting ranging from Rembrandts to Tracey Emin. “My family came here in 1756,” says Baltzar Wachtmeister, of the eighth Wachtmeister generation to run the 4,200-hectare estate. A corporate lawyer in Stockholm before destiny called him home, Baltzar lives here with his wife, Kristina, and their four daughters — Alice, Ruth, Ingrid and Betty. They take up the ‘east wing’, one of a pair of residences flanking the magnificent 15th-century Wanås Castle, where his parents reside. Built around 1760, the Wachtmeister’s 400-square-metre house was last occupied by Baltzar’s great-grandmother and had been used as a repository for cast-offs from the castle. “We tried to use all the things we found here,” says Kristina, whose design ethos was to be “contemporary but talk to the house”. A construction architect, Kristina says she’s more excited by floor plans than soft furnishings. She liked the layout and flow of the ground-floor rooms with their sightlines to the garden but moved the kitchen and dining room to a parlour on the sunny southern side. Overcoming some family resistance, she replaced old wooden floors with parquetry made from oak planks double the normal width. “Everything is a bit upscale because the proportions of the house are quite big.” Baltzar and Kristina’s far-from-safe contemporary art collection takes precedence. A large screen showing an animated video by hot Swedish duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg shares the living room with an armoire from the castle, one drawer of which is full of faded silk lampshades that look like they pre-date electricity. Two portraits of Baltzar’s great-grandparents grace an entrance foyer illuminated by Tracey Emin’s neon The Kiss Was Beautiful and Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Starbrick’ light. “We buy what we like and never think about where it will go,” says Kristina. It all works because of the restraint shown otherwise. She used the same Swedish brännlyckan stone for kitchen benches and bathrooms, for instance, picking up its green tones in terrazzo floors and wall colours. “I really like when you have the same colour and there’s a thread through the design.” Outside, Kristina added a stone terrace reached through French doors off the dining room to better connect the house to its verdant surroundings. It offers her favourite perspective. “We can see the castle, pond and swimming pool — and hear people playing tennis,” she says. The sculpture park displays almost 70 works by acclaimed international artists such as Robert Wilson, Jenny Holzer and Yoko Ono. »
“We thought we would miss the city life more but we love it here, it’s a nice mix” — Baltzar Wachtmeister
‹‹ “We thought we would miss the city life more but we love it here, it’s a nice mix,” he says. It has inspired them to open an 11-room hotel and restaurant next year. “We hope that visitors will meet other visitors and artists the way we have appreciated hanging out,” says Baltzar. Kristina is running the project, converting two former cow and horse stables circa 1770 with massive 1.2-metre-deep walls and ancient arched iron windows into a quietly luxurious haven. She’s using oak from their forest for floorboards; there’ll be flowers from their garden, eggs from their hens and organic produce from their farm. All this and a powerful sense of place and history enlivened by thoughtprovoking art immersed in nature. Says Kristina, “It’s all about letting people live the life we have here.”