Cathy Nordström wasn’t going to buy a summer house in Torekov. The tiny Swedish fishing village, on the northwest edge of a peninsula in Skåne in the south of the country, was home to her parents’ summer house, as well as those of “aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins”. A lifetime of holidays there almost persuaded Cathy, a textile and wallpaper designer, “to rebel” against going down the same route. “And then I got my own family, and the lovely thing about this place is that the kids jump on their bikes in the morning and I barely see them. Or I have, like, eight eleven-year-old boys in my kitchen, starving for lunch. It’s a very social destination, a great summer hangout. So we ended up buying our own.”
In Sweden, with a culture that sees almost all families own summer cabins called sommarstuga no matter their social background, it can be hard to escape the idyll. When she first saw the house three years ago, Cathy was also sceptical of its location at the end of a cul-de-sac and its date of construction in 1978, but her father – who had known previous owners – persuaded her to take a look anyway. She was struck by the size of the place (more than enough to comfortably house all those ravenous eleven-year-olds rampaging around Torekov), and the privacy it offered, too. “Someone, I think, back in the day, wanted to make this feel like a French house, because you walk into this courtyard, and there’s lavender and it’s really secluded. You have this wall surrounding the whole house; no one can peek in.” So, on gut instinct, she took the plunge.
There wasn’t a load to change inside beyond some rejigging of the electrics and heating (insanely located in the ceilings since the 1980s), and replacing the cold tile floor of the main living room with a warmer blonde wood. A wonderful stepped chimney descending from the ceiling to open on two sides was kept in situ, the better to flood the house with warmth in the winter, as well as a happy woodsmoke smell. Even the kitchen remained unaltered beyond a fresh coat of paint. “It’s a really nice, quality kitchen, which I was really happy about because I didn’t want to do a major reno. I wanted to keep as much as possible the way it was.”
Instead, the house offered Cathy a chance to redecorate to the nines; to introduce textures, silhouettes and colours that she might not otherwise have used in her cooler, more considered home in Stockholm. She began by curating a Pinterest board per room, then got to work. Most of the furniture was vintage, found in the bountiful local flea markets – “Only the beds are new,” Cathy explains – and then, as you might expect for a textile designer, she had her chairs, sofas, headboards and various other pieces reupholstered in new materials, including her own.
Central to the scheme was the idea of comfort. In Sweden, where the sun can rise at 3am in the summer, good fabric can be more than just a question of taste. “We have spent nights at friends’ summer houses when the babies were small, and they didn’t have any curtains. You wake up at 4am in someone else's house, and your baby’s wide awake, and you don’t know where to go. So I put a lot of effort into the guestroom; nice and dark and comfortable.”
Cushions were another area in which Cathy refused to compromise, describing herself as “a cushion maniac”. She has different pillows to offer her guests, depending on what sort of consistency they find easiest to sleep on. “I travel with my own cushions,” she explains. “I can sleep on pretty much any mattress, but if the cushion’s synthetic, rock hard, my whole vacation is ruined. I want our guests to sleep really well.”
When it comes to textiles and pattern, Cathy describes her philosophy as “If you're hesitating, go for it.” The William Morris wallpaper in her bedroom was inspired by a scheme she saw in an outpost of Soho House, but much of the rest of the wallpaper and fabric in the house is inspired by creativity closer to home. Cathy names the Swedish textile artists and weavers Märta Måås-Fjetterström and Marianne Richter as major influences, but while she notes that “the DNA of my brand is Swedish”, her design is far from parochial. She collects vintage American quilts, and they adorn many of the beds and sofas of the house. Flat-weave rugs that she designed herself for the floors – “the measurements were so specific” – were woven for her in Jaipur. And elsewhere, she talks about the influence of English cottages in the décor of the sommarstuga.
It can be hard to remember, at times, that she has only been running her namesake brand for two years. She founded Cathy Nordström in 2019 (the decision to produce in Sweden has paid dividends as the global supply chain crisis continues to bite), and has consistently drawn on her own life as inspiration for her design practice. Some of her patterns and prints are based on travel memories, like ‘Lanka’, which was inspired by the plants in the garden of a rented house in Sri Lanka that Cathy stayed in, and ‘Kinondo’, which is named for some friends’ hotel in Kenya.
Other designs come from family or her favourite artists. ‘Marianne’ is named for Richter, the weaver, while ‘Florence’ is a tribute to Cathy’s grandmother. “I inherited a chair from her, and she had chosen this fabric back in the 60s, which I loved and I was like, ‘I would have chosen this fabric today.’ So I did a version of that design now and updated it.” After we speak, Cathy emails a long list of Swedish designers who inspire her: Måås-Fjetterström and Richter, but also Vicke Lindstrand, Astrid Sampe, Elsa Gullberg and Barbro Nilsson. She also loves the work of Arthur Percy, Anna-Lisa Thomson, Sonia Delauney and Raoul Dufy, and “many of the Russian avant-garde artist in the 1920s. Many of these designers worked in different media; ceramics, textiles and sometimes furniture. It feels like it was a very experimental and exciting time to work.”
Cathy’s most recent undertaking is a collaboration with Nina Litchfield on six cushions, sparked by a meeting over Instagram. The two met over the social network and “connected over design and motherhood and friendship”, Cathy says. When the discussion turned to a possible collaboration, Cathy leapt at the chance. “In the UK, you guys are much better at doing these kinds of things. You collaborate; Ben Pentreath has an illustrator doing the pop-up in his shop and this illustrator draws in the space on the window. You do these small pop-up things. In Sweden, it's a bit flat. So I welcomed the collaboration because I just think they’re so fun.” The results are a series of playful, vibrant cushions; doubtless there will be many more in the future. After all, Cathy announces,“you can't have too many blankets or quilts.”
