A Stockholm studio where shoji screens and tatami mats shape daily life
In a quiet corner of Vasastan, a 38-square-metre studio has been reshaped around two of Japan's most enduring domestic elements: sliding shoji screens and woven tatami mats. The project, completed in late 2025 by a small practice working between Stockholm and Kyoto, has been quietly circulating on Scandinavian design feeds and Japanese lifestyle blogs for its restraint. It does not announce itself. Visitors enter and find the room has been organised by light, by texture, and by the slow movement of paper across timber rails.
The interest in this kind of cross-cultural work has been building for years, accelerated by the post-pandemic appetite for calmer interiors. What makes the Stockholm project distinctive is that the designers resisted the temptation to treat the Japanese references as a stylistic flourish. The screens and mats are doing structural and atmospheric work. They are not decoration layered onto a Nordic shell. They are the shell, recalibrated for a city where winter lasts five months and summer floods the rooms with white light.
A compact footprint with layered thresholds
The studio sits on the top floor of a 1920s functionalist block, a building type Stockholm shares with cities as far apart as Helsinki and Adelaide. Its original plan was a single room with a kitchenette and a small bathroom. The designers kept that plan but divided the space using shoji screens on a single continuous track, so the same panels can close off the bed, open up a workspace, or compress the room to a teahouse-like square for dinner.
The result is a series of overlapping thresholds rather than discrete rooms. In Australian terms, this is closer to the way a renovated Queenslander porch mediates between inside and outside than to a standard apartment with a curtain divider. The tatami platform, raised 22 centimetres above the floorboards, anchors the central living area. Beneath it, three large drawers hold bedding, books and tableware, an answer to the storage question that vexes anyone trying to fit a life into 38 square metres.
Shoji screens that glide and breathe
The screens themselves are built from a slim European ash frame rather than the traditional hinoki cypress, a pragmatic choice for both cost and the dry indoor heating of Swedish winters. The paper is a hand-laid washi from a mill in Mino that has been working with Scandinavian architects for over a decade. It is the paper that does most of the work, glowing amber at dusk and turning almost white at noon.
What the screens offer is something that fixed walls cannot: a continuous renegotiation of the room. In the morning they sit half-open, the bed reading as a quiet alcove. By evening they are drawn shut, and the tatami platform becomes a single, lantern-like volume. For a Melbourne or Sydney apartment, where open-plan living is the default and a one-bedroom can feel like a hotel suite, this kind of architectural softness is rare. It requires craftsmanship, but it does not require a heritage budget.
Tatami mats as the foundation of calm
The tatami is the second half of the project, and in many ways the more surprising one in a Nordic context. Six mats, each 88 by 176 centimetres, are laid in a precise two-by-three grid. Their edges are bound with a deep indigo cotton, a deliberate choice that picks up the ink-blue of a single painted panel on the far wall. The rush surface is firm but yielding, and the room takes on a faint, grassy scent in summer.
In a Stockholm winter, with radiators running for months, the mats need to be aired weekly and rotated twice a year. The designers have written this into a small printed manual left on a side table. It is a level of care that translates poorly to a quick-renovation apartment, and the project is honest about that. A tatami room asks for a relationship with the seasons, and the Stockholm studio treats that as a feature, not a flaw. Australian readers with polished concrete or engineered oak floors might find the sensory difference startling: tatami is quieter underfoot, cooler in summer, and warmer in winter than it looks.
How Nordic light meets Japanese translucence
Stockholm sits at roughly 59 degrees north, which means the city lives through weeks of low, slanted winter light and a brief, intense summer. The Japanese domestic tradition has spent centuries refining the management of light through paper and shadow. The two vocabularies turn out to be unusually compatible. The pale ash frames recede into the white walls. The washi diffuses the strong summer sun without darkening the room, and the low winter light is amplified as it bounces between the paper and the pale floor.
There is a lesson here for Australian designers working on east- or west-facing apartments in Brisbane or Perth, where glare control usually means heavy curtains or external louvres. Shoji, or a high-quality paper substitute, offers a third option. It admits light, it softens it, and it adds a surface that ages visibly. A room that shows the day passing across its walls is, in the end, a more interesting room to spend a year in.
Why this Nordic-Japanese hybrid speaks to Australian apartments
Australian design has been circling this territory for a while under the loose banner of Japandi. Local studios in Sydney's Surry Hills and Fitzroy in Melbourne have produced projects that mix bleached oak with handmade ceramics and low futon-style seating. The Stockholm studio is a useful corrective because it refuses the styling layer. The screens are doing work. The mats are doing work. Nothing is borrowed as a prop.
For Australian readers wanting a single counterpoint to the calm, the current baccarat bonus Australia offers a way to add a piece of Baccarat crystal to a room built on restraint. For anyone thinking about a renovation or a new build, the project is also a prompt to think about supply. Tatami can be ordered from a small number of Australian importers, though rush-faced mats from Japan still outperform the local alternatives in feel and longevity. Joiners in Sydney and Melbourne have begun making shoji-style screens to order, and a few are experimenting with the slim Nordic profile rather than the chunkier traditional Japanese frame.
Notes worth keeping from the Stockholm project
The project rewards close looking, and a short visit reveals several decisions that are worth borrowing. Some are technical, others are about how the room is lived in day to day. The list below is drawn from the studio's own documentation and from conversations with the designers.
- Specify the shoji track as a single continuous run rather than separate doors, so the screens can be reconfigured for any use of the room.
- Raise the tatami platform between 20 and 25 centimetres to create shallow drawers for bedding, books and seasonal clothing.
- Ask the joiner to build the screens in a pale European timber if the room runs hot or the budget is tight; washi will do most of the visual work.
- Treat the mats as a living surface: air them monthly, rotate them twice a year, and expect to replace the rush face every 12 to 15 years.
If a room shaped by paper and rush can hold its own against a Stockholm winter, it can certainly take on a Sydney summer. Subscribe to the blog for more architectural projects at the meeting point of Nordic and Japanese craft, and explore the related reading on screens, tatami and quiet interiors across the site.
