Serving History

A stack of blue-and-white patterned everyday plates

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Sjöberg, an art historian and former curator at the National Museum of Antiquities in Stockholm, is one of Sweden’s leading authorities on Gustavian decorative arts, the Rococo and Baroque styles associated with the Enlightenment-era reign of King Gustav III. To create an archive of Swedish craftsmanship and taste during what’s known as his country’s “age of greatness,” he buys 200- to 300-year-old homes and furnishes them as veritable time capsules.

He currently has nine houses. Some, such as his estates at Sorby, Odenslunda and Salaholm, scattered throughout the Swedish countryside, are manor houses built by noble families, merchants and even farmers who wanted to bring princely styles to the provinces. Others, such as the palatial Ekensberg—on the shores of Lake Malaren, west of Stockholm—are modeled on Italian villas.

Owning the houses allows Sjöberg to re-create the interiors of the Gustavian period, from the hand-painted linen wallpaper, ceramic-tiled stoves, imported English ladder-back chairs, glittering chandeliers and gilded moldings right down to the dinner plates and teapots. That desire to construct an authentic historical ambience led him to one collecting specialty in particular: Chinese export porcelain shipped from Canton to Sweden during the 18th century to satisfy a market passionate for Asian goods.

“Porcelain is a way to explain Sweden in the 18th century,” Sjöberg tells me during a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Stockholm to Regnaholm, a three-story Rococo manor situated on an island in a lake surrounded by farmland, where most of his porcelain is currently housed. “The whole of Swedish society was very much changed by the contact with China, not just decorative ideas but also political and philosophical ones. Everyone wanted to have Chinese figures and Chinese linens printed after Chinese fabrics. The Swedes took China very much to their hearts.”

Sjöberg, who is 66, can’t remember what his first acquisition was but guesses it might have been the punch bowls he purchased around 1966, the year he bought Regnaholm. “While I was searching for furniture, I would find these porcelain items too—so fantastically cheap for such beautiful things.”

Today, Regnaholm, in the lake district of Ostergotland north of Stockholm, contains at least a thousand Chinese export pieces, from the blue-and-white everyday plates arrayed on two walls in the kitchen to the custom-made set displayed on a marble-topped table upstairs, embossed with a coat of arms painted in gold enamel. The set was once owned by Count Carl Gyllenborg, a former prime minister of Sweden, who lived in the house at Odenslunda.

With his gray hair and pale blue eyes, and wearing a frayed corduroy jacket and chinos that billow about his legs, Sjöberg is the classic rumpled professor. A compact five feet four inches tall, he is always in motion—fixing a broken door latch, moving furniture in and out of his well-traveled blue 1986 Volvo station wagon, plucking pears off trees in the orchard. The toes of his leather shoes look as though mice had gnawed them, and the seams have come apart at the back. His hands are thick and callused from yard work and house maintenance, all of which he does himself. He and his wife, Ursula, also an art historian and curator, spend most of their time at Odenslunda, in Uppland. They summer at Regnaholm but frequently travel among their various houses, transporting furniture and objects from one to another.

The grandson of a furniture maker and son of a teacher of wood and metal crafting, Sjöberg wanted to be an artist as a child, but his family encouraged an academic path. He studied art and art history at Stockholm University and furniture restoration at the Royal Academy of Fine Art, then landed a job as curator of 18th-century furniture at the National Museum, a post he held for 36 years. For a while, he worked as a consultant to IKEA, helping the furniture company create replicas of historical designs. He has also published at least 13 books in Swedish and 2 in English. Among his best-known titles are Swedish House (Monacelli Press) and The Swedish Room (Frances Lincoln Ltd.), which he co-authored with his wife.