On your left, look for the five-story brown-gray limestone facade with three projecting bay windows and a deep arched entrance framed by carved shells.
This is Havssvalget seventeen at Storgatan ten, and it is pure Stockholm theater in stone. The building rose in nineteen oh seven as an upscale apartment house, and the architects Hagström and Ekman gave it a full-on Jugend style face - that’s the Scandinavian version of Art Nouveau, a style that loves flowing lines, flowers, curves, and a little bit of drama. And this house absolutely understands drama.
Start with the facade. Those projecting windows are bay windows, built to push outward and catch more light and street views. The middle one turns rounded and carries a small balcony above, while the whole top edge of the building thrusts out on hefty stone brackets. Then there’s that long wrought-iron balcony stretching across the fifth floor... elegant, confident, just a little grand.
The neighborhood name has a fantastic old flavor too. Havssvalget appears in records from the sixteen fifties, when this part of Ladugårdslandet began taking shape, and on a map from seventeen thirty-three it shows up as Hafsswalget. The word meant a sea whirlpool, or even a bottomless deep - the place older generations imagined the sea itself might surge from. Around here, many block names lean nautical: sea maidens, whales, sea calves, sea horses. Stockholm loved turning geography into poetry.
This particular property combines plots seventeen and eighteen. Builders had been working this land since at least the seventeen hundreds, but in the eighteen eighties the estate of farmer C. J. M. Eklund cleared away an earlier house from the eighteen forties. Then builder Karl Johan Flodin stepped in. He was one of Stockholm’s big speculative developers, the kind of man who built stylish homes and sold them on, and he stamped his identity right onto the facade. If you spot the letters K-J-F on the lower parts of the bay windows, that’s Flodin signing his work in public.
For a time, later repairs buried the original painted decoration under pink plaster. Then, in nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety-one, a major restoration peeled that away and brought back the house’s original floral painting in brown, beige, and gold. The carved festoons and shells around the portal, the deep recessed entry, even the spirit of the entrance hall inside - with green Kolmården marble, yellow marbling, and gilded lotus capitals - all of it speaks the language of turn-of-the-century luxury. Since nineteen ninety-one, the investment company Industrivärden has kept its headquarters here, and the Stockholm City Museum has given the building a blue mark, its highest heritage rating.
This house turns commerce, ambition, and ornament into one polished urban performance. When you’re ready, continue on and let the next stop show you another face of Östermalm.
