Sjöberg feels some regret about not following his original vocation. But acquiring and preserving 18th-century residences, he says, “is my way of expressing what I wasn’t able to do when I didn’t become an artist or architect.”

His homes are, in fact, meticulously constructed aesthetic experiences, each interior stripped of overt ornamentation and presented in a placid state of weathered beauty. Walking through the manor at Regnaholm, one gets the sense of being backstage at a theater that hasn’t seen a production in months. Furniture and objets d’art fill unused rooms and hallways. Sjöberg hasn’t installed any modern conveniences, such as electricity or plumbing, to make the manor more habitable. “I have lived so much for making the books and the photographs for them that I’ve hardly started to live my own life at all,” he admits. “I should say I’m not very normal.”

Although he never opens his residences to the public, Sjoberg’s students visit to help him with the preservation work. Mostly the houses are for his family’s enjoyment, but Sjoberg explains that he thinks of them as backdrops for the photographs that illustrate the books he writes so prolifically rather than as places in which to live. For the past five years, he’s been completing a volume about Chinese porcelain with the English working title China in Sweden During the 18th Century, co-authored by historian Cecilia Bengtsson. His writing projects have also motivated his acquisitions. “It’s easier for me to buy things than to try to get museums to give me the rights to the images,” he says.

Sjöberg is not as passionate about actually purchasing pieces as about finding the precisely right ones with the most historical resonance. He admits, though, that his buying has gotten out of hand. In the antechamber to Regnaholm’s kitchen, there are perhaps 400 tureens, bowls, vases and platters, plus a rare porcelain garden seat from Canton that Sjoberg found broken at an antiques fair. “I passed all limits a long time ago,” he says. “You could call it obsession. When you’re really doing something, you want to do it the best way, and for me that means forgetting everything else.”

Swedish handmade furniture and crafts experienced a golden age in the 18th century, but the country did not establish its own ceramics factory, Rorstrand, until 1726. The company started by making faience (glazed earthenware pottery)—“china,” as porcelain was called even then, is more difficult to manufacture because it must be fired at very high temperatures to form an end product that is harder than other ceramics but still lightweight and translucent. Not surprisingly then, even after domestic production began, porcelain from Asia was far more coveted. The Swedish East India Company imported about 50 million pieces from China between its founding, in 1731, and its final trip, around 1813.

Unlike the multicolored plates and platters that were popular in other parts of Europe, the porcelain that was exported to Sweden tended to be underglaze blue on a white body, and the period furniture picked up that color scheme. Table settings with simple bird or flower motifs were relatively inexpensive and easy to come by. Those who could afford a little more luxury would often order sets decorated with family crests.

“People wanted the best and most expensive things. It was very much a matter of social prestige,” Sjoberg explains. That pride of ownership is what he hopes to recapture through his own collecting. “Many people go into collecting to buy something for a little and sell it for a lot. I prefer to buy something for more than it’s worth and get the right thing.”

Sjöberg couldn’t care less about resale value. “It’s only snobs who want perfect things,” he says. “I like the imperfect, the broken things, especially mended things. They’re cheaper, and often they tell the story better. I like to see how people mended these plates with little metal staples and continued to use them in the 19th century. That tells you how valuable these pieces were to people, how much they used them.”