Teodor Lindqvist

Teodor Lindqvist is the interiors editor of Ruvyne, working from Stockholm. He practised as an interior architect for nine years before turning to writing, and reports mainly on what happens to a room in the decade after the builders leave.

Lindqvist trained in interior architecture in Stockholm and spent most of his practice years on private houses and small hotels, the kind of work in which a client's budget and a photographer's deadline arrive at the same moment. He left the profession without much drama, having grown tired of specifying surfaces he knew would look worse every year and of the polite silence around that fact. The writing began as notes made on site visits, mostly about which materials had survived and which had merely been replaced. His preoccupations have stayed narrow and consistent: patina, material honesty, maintenance as a form of design, and the awkward gap between rooms that photograph well and rooms that are pleasant to occupy. He is sceptical of the finished scheme and of any surface that can only be restored by being replaced in its entirety. He returns often to houses he wrote about years earlier, which is the only reliable way to find out whether a specification was right. At Ruvyne he covers interiors with an emphasis on the long view, favouring reported visits over showroom launches and revisits over first impressions. He collects chairs without much system, keeps a workshop for repairs he is not qualified to make, and writes from an apartment in Sodermalm with lime plastered walls that took two winters to look intentional.