The apartment below me has just been sold. I was going to link to the advert but it went down as soon as the apartment sold (which it did, immediately, for $416 157.00/€371 751.40/£274 148.226). These photos all belong to Notar, Sweden. The apartment is exactly the same layout as mine – two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, hallway and walk in closet.
I am lucky to live in such a beautiful area. On the top of a hill beside a forest and metres from the second biggest lake in Sweden, Mälaren. Despite the pastoral feel of it, I am fifteen minutes from the centre of the city. I can take a bus, boat, tram or underground to work and use my monthly travel card to do it.
The area is a former working class area being gentrified at the moment – lots of factories have been turned into loft apartments and many people want to live here. A few years ago no one wanted to buy apartments like mine, but now they are in huge demand.
An interesting cultural thing is that Swedes talk about their apartments in terms of rooms (rather than number of bedrooms) and square metres. I now know exactly how many square metres things are but when I moved to Sweden I didn’t have a clue! So an apartment would be described as 2 rooms, 45 m2, rather than one bedroom. I come from a small town so my last house in South Africa was over 300 m2 and my last apartment was 110 m2 so it took me a long time to get used to living in such small spaces.
There is also a huge housing shortage in Stockholm. People are on the waiting list for rental apartments for up to 30 years. It can easily take 12 years before you find a rental apartment and even then it may not be what you want. And as you can see above, Stockholm house and apartment prices are crazy.
I am not a Swedish minimalist and my spaces are not so Scandinavianly white so this is what my smaller bedroom looks like. I use it as an office so it is neat but cluttered and I love working here. The igloos on the floor are to keep the cats off my desk. They don’t often work! The light is missing a shade because the cat jumped from the chair to try and get inside it. Needless to say the shade lost the battle. I have now replaced it though!
A comparable apartment (size, location and building desirability) in Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia) is around AUD 700,000/GBP 323,000/Euro 438.251/USD 491,000. If you wanted the same thing in Sydney, you could probably add at least 25% if not a lot more. There are cheaper available, but then you give up the desirable location, convenient access to public transport, etc. There is talk of a housing bubble, which of course no one wants, but our housing prices are quite ridiculous.
It’s very pretty but not very practical! I always feel that places like that would look horribly cluttered and messy as soon as someone moved in and actually started living there…
btw can you enlighten me on the logic of having the washing machine in the bathroom? Surely electricity and random water don’t mix very well?
I chose to have a bathtub in my bathroom rather than a washing machine – I use the communal laundry in the basement instead – but all the bathrooms I have had in Sweden have been wet rooms so I imagine everything is designed to be waterproof. I certainly hope so! Wet rooms are really nice and so easy to clean!
In Russia it is common for washing machines to be in the bathroom. Our bathrooms are not designed to be wet rooms, and I have never heard of anyone having issues.
I do love seeing where my overseas friends live! I would love that apartment – but I’d be too terrified to touch anything! Your flat is my style exactly – books and dark furniture everywhere. Love it.
This is a very nice apartment! I am very fond of minimalist decoration and l also have white walls and furniture in mine (some things are beige, taupe or grey too).
Though the apartment pictured here is small and cosy it is nicely done and welcoming.
I also moved from to a huge house to an apartment in Paris and l could have never lived in less than 250m2. It is weird how one gets used to large spaces and find it hard to live in smaller places.
I still battle but it is much better now it is just me. Before there were three of us here.
I know what you mean! It is just me too and if we were 2 we would have to go back to a large house. Otherwise l’d feel like a sardine in a tin!
In my dreams I would love to live in a stunningly decorated flat like this, although I would be too scared to actually use anything.
In reality your small bedroom, used as an office, is more my style…books, memories, cats and also a small sewing space squeezed in 🙂
Yes mine is cluttered, full of cat hair and not designery but you can relax and not worry about getting the cushions out of place!