The Home Front: How to make a Scandinavian bed

Credit to Author: rebeccakeillor| Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2019 12:29:29 +0000

A love of all things Scandinavian is still going strong in home decor and accessories, but something we don’t often hear about is how to make a Scandinavian bed.

Anki Spets is the founder of AREA, a New York-based bedding and home-accessories company launched almost 30 years ago when Spets arrived from Sweden and couldn’t find any bedding she liked.

At the time, she says, bedding in North America was very fussy, with a focus on everything matching.

Bedding is approached quite differently in Sweden, she says. For starters, it’s all about the materials that are used, so AREA products are made from cotton from Portugal, linen from Lithuania and alpaca wool from Peru. They don’t use a top sheet, she says, simply a bottom sheet — often not a fitted one, but one just folded around the bed — duvet covers and a pillow. 

She says multiple pillows on a bed is very North American, and although that’s now creeping into European home-decor styling, traditionally in Sweden, it’s been a single pillow.

Also different, she says, is that in Sweden, you have one duvet per person, instead of one duvet per bed.

“They can be different weights. So one can be heavier than the other,” says Spets.

Elias blanket by AREA. Photo: AREA for The Home Front: How to make a Scandinavian bed by Rebecca Keillor [PNG Merlin Archive] PNG

You get a lot of bang for your home-decor buck when it comes to bedding, she says, and this was her thinking in launching AREA.

“The bed is pretty big, and it has a big impact [on your home decor] if you have some nice bedding.”

With more people living in smaller spaces, beds are becoming much more display items, says Spets.

“If you apartment isn’t that big, your bed might be visible all day, so it has to look good without too much effort and that’s mostly the fabric more than anything else. If you have a nice fabric or nice colour, then it doesn’t matter if it’s rumply, or this or that, it’s still going to be attractive,” she says.

Colour is also very important to Spets.

Perla duvet collection by AREA. Photo: AREA for The Home Front: How to make a Scandinavian bed by Rebecca Keillor [PNG Merlin Archive] PNG

“I spend a lot of time thinking about, and testing colours, because I love it. I have my own colour library, which I work with. When you work in fashion, as I did before, you have to think about it,” she says.

AREA is also known for its use of graphic prints.

“Scandinavia is graphic-print orientated, a little bit more like Britain, which has more of a print tradition than North America. And so in the beginning, I made patterns that were bold. They were much bolder than what I do now. Now I mostly focus on the weave, the materials, the feeling of the materials and the colour,” she says.

The Scandinavian approach to bedding is very freeing, she says, because the emphasis is not on achieving a perfectly made bed with ironed sheets. Her friends would be surprised to hear that she irons her clothes, she says, but never her sheets. The thinking around your bed should be comfort and a simple esthetic, she says, easy to achieve and easy to maintain.

Though AREA bedding isn’t cheap, says Spets, describing her company as the first step into luxury bedding, it’s designed to last. And not just in terms of the materials lasting, but also your fondness for it.

She says that often, her clients buy something like a duvet from her, and five years later a blanket to go with it, adding the fact that they’re from different collections or made from different materials doesn’t matter because they still go together.

“It’s much more desirable to work like that as a designer,” Spets says.

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