The State Bedroom from Ulvsunda as a Museological Project

A major undertaking for Swedish cultural historians at the turn of the century 1900 was to map the indigenous built heritage. Here the Nordiska museet was a leading actor, not least when it came to investigating castles and manor houses. At the inauguration of its new building in 1907, the museum displayed a magnificent series of Swedish period rooms. This paper focuses on one of these – the State Bedroom from Ulvsunda castle. Through this example, the presentation aims at highlighting the period rooms at the Nordiska museet, their role in a museological context and how they relate to the museum’s knowledge production.

The modernization of society strongly affected the estates of the Swedish nobility. Ulvsunda outside of Stockholm was swallowed by the urban expansion already around 1900, when its land was exploited and its seventeenth-century castle turned into a nursing home. At this instance, the museum acquired some of the castle’s elaborate baroque fittings. This is also typical for the time, as the old elite culture was considered equally threatened by modernity as the peasant culture. The Nordiska museet developed an expertise within the history of Swedish domestic culture, including collections, research projects, publications and exhibitions.

The Ulvsunda bedchamber became part of the period rooms that formed the backbone of the museum’s upper-class department, illustrating the homes of the privileged classes from the sixteenth century to present days. The galleries can be regarded as physical representations of the museum’s expertise within the field. Eventually the period rooms became obsolete, and they were dismantled and put into storage in the 1970s. Completely different museological ideals characterised the sequel within this area; Swedish House and Home. However, the Ulvsunda interior was included in the new installation. After 111 years the room is now one of Nordiska museet’s most long-lived attractions.