When we were designing the house, we kept coming back to the same word. Lagom. It's Swedish, and it roughly translates to "just the right amount," though that doesn't fully capture it. It's less of a measurement and more of a feeling. The sense that something has exactly what it needs and nothing extra.
It's why we chose Lagom Escapes as our brand.
What it looks like
Laura spent eight months on the interior, and one of the things she kept saying throughout was that she didn't want guests to walk in and immediately start cataloging things. The fireplace, the view, the game room, sure. But not a room full of stuff competing for attention.
That meant pulling back a lot. Choosing materials that are honest about what they are: real wood, real linen, stone that has some age to it. Keeping surfaces clear. Letting the windows do the work they're supposed to do, which is bring the outside in, because the outside here is pretty hard to compete with.
The result doesn't feel sparse. There's warmth in it. Blankets, books, good lighting. It just doesn't feel cluttered, and that turns out to matter more than we expected once you're actually living in the space for a few days.
Why it matters when you're away from home
We've noticed something with guests over the past couple of years. A lot of people arrive wound up. Phones out, catching up on whatever they didn't finish before they left. By day two, something usually shifts. They're slower. Reading. Sitting on the deck without doing anything in particular.
We don't think that's entirely the location, though the location helps. We think it's also the space itself. When a room isn't asking anything of you, it's easier to stop asking things of yourself.
Busy environments produce busy minds. That sounds like a fortune cookie, but it holds up. The design choices in this house were deliberate attempts to create the opposite of that.
If you want to bring any of this home
Lagom isn't really an aesthetic, it's more of a practice. A few things that actually work:
Take one thing off a surface you walk past every day. Live without it for a week and see if you miss it.
Give a room one thing worth looking at and let everything else support it rather than compete with it.
Use materials you want to touch. Wood, linen, ceramic. Things that get better with use instead of worse.
Pay attention to light. Where lamps are positioned, what the windows are doing in the morning versus the evening. It changes a room more than most furniture decisions do.
None of this requires a renovation. It's mostly subtraction.
A note on what rest actually means
The word gets thrown around a lot in vacation rentals, usually to mean more of everything. More square footage, more amenities, more features on a list.
Our version of it is simpler. A place where you actually rest. Where you're not managing anything or optimizing anything. Where you show up tired and leave feeling like yourself again.
Lagom (pronounced LAH-gom) — a Swedish word meaning "just the right amount." Not too much, not too little. Exactly enough. There is no direct English equivalent, which may be why the feeling it describes is so hard to manufacture.
That's what we built toward. We think lagom gets you there faster than anything else.