158 VOGUELIVING.COM.AU
igh on the gable wall of an old barn on Wanås
Estate in southern Sweden are two intersecting
clocks. They look like mirror images; the right one
tells the time and the left one goes backwards. It’s
an artwork by Esther Shalev-Gerz called Les
Inséparables — a conjoined pair linking the past
with the future. They’re a fitting symbol for Wanås
(pronounced ‘Vanoos’), a 15th-century farming
and forestry property with a history of art collecting ranging from
Rembrandts to Tracey Emin.
“My family came here in 1756,” says Baltzar Wachtmeister, of the
eighth Wachtmeister generation to run the 4,200-hectare estate.
A corporate lawyer in Stockholm before destiny called him home,
Baltzar lives here with his wife, Kristina, and their four daughters —
Alice, Ruth, Ingrid and Betty. They take up the ‘east wing’, one of
a pair of residences flanking the magnificent 15th-century Wanås
Castle, where his parents reside.
Built around 1760, the Wachtmeister’s 400-square-metre house was
last occupied by Baltzar’s great-grandmother and had been used as
a repository for cast-offs from the castle. “We tried to use all the things
we found here,” says Kristina, whose design ethos was to be
“contemporary but talk to the house”. A construction architect,
Kristina says she’s more excited by floor plans than soft furnishings.
She liked the layout and flow of the ground-floor rooms with theirsightlines to the garden but moved the kitchen and dining room to
a parlour on the sunny southern side. Overcoming some family
resistance, she replaced old wooden floors with parquetry made from
oak planks double the normal width. “Everything is a bit upscale
because the proportions of the house are quite big.”
Baltzar and Kristina’s far-from-safe contemporary art collection
takes precedence. A large screen showing an animated video by hot
Swedish duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg shares the living
room with an armoire from the castle, one drawer of which is full of
faded silk lampshades that look like they pre-date electricity. Two
portraits of Baltzar’s great-grandparents grace an entrance foyer
illuminated by Tracey Emin’s neon The Kiss Was Beautiful and Olafur
Eliasson’s ‘Starbrick’ light. “We buy what we like and never think
about where it will go,” says Kristina. It all works because of the
restraint shown otherwise. She used the same Swedish brännlyckan
stone for kitchen benches and bathrooms, for instance, picking up its
green tones in terrazzo floors and wall colours. “I really like when you
have the same colour and there’s a thread through the design.”
Outside, Kristina added a stone terrace reached through French
doors off the dining room to better connect the house to its verdant
surroundings. It offers her favourite perspective. “We can see the castle,
pond and swimming pool — and hear people playing tennis,” she says.
The sculpture park displays almost 70 works by acclaimed international
artists such as Robert Wilson, Jenny Holzer and Yoko Ono. »