Beyond minimalism: why we should be looking to Scandinavia for maximalist inspiration

The Swedish word 'lagom'", says the designer Liza Laserow, the co-founder of rug company Nordic Knots, "reflects something very important about Swedish design. It means "not too much, not too little, just right." This sense of moderation and restraint is central to ideas of the 'Scandi interior', which revolve, to outsiders at least, around an image of wooden floors, neutral fabrics, white walls and clean forms. There are good reasons why the world has been drawn towards this kind of Scandinavian design: it's airy, simple and comfortable, and it's a look that can be replicated with any kind of budget. Yet there is another side to the region's heritage, one that dovetails neatly with a more maximalist aesthetic, and it seems to be having a moment.

Perhaps the most obvious point of reference is the design legacy of Josef Frank, the Austrian designer who fled to Sweden in the 1930s and became involved with the now-iconic homewares shop Svenskt Tenn not long after its inception. He designed an extensive collection of fabrics with an instantly recognisable combination of eclectic colour schemes and bold floral prints. Rebelling against the understated, clean-lines that characterised modern design in the 1930s, Frank's patterns were revolutionary for their time, but not at all were well-received by the design press in Sweden.

Nevertheless, Frank's patterns, one-off though they may be, have a huge following, and are much-beloved in the design world to this day. The interior designer Martin Brudnizki sees Frank as part of an essentially Swedish tradition, despite their singularity. "It's a distinctly Swedish thing to take classical motifs and abstract them to create more modern and simple lines. You can see this in how Josef Frank re-interpreted botanical patterns," he explains. The patterns seem to be having a particular moment these days; we love how American designer Meta Coleman often makes use of the lively textiles and wallpapers, and Beata Heuman cites Frank as perhaps her most important design influence.

Another prominent fan of Frank is Tina Seidenfaden Busck, the founder of shop-cum-gallery The Apartment in Cophenagen, and a brilliant exponent of the modern Scandinavian maximalist look. With a discerning eye and an illustrious career at galleries and auction houses behind her, Seidenfaden Busck founded The Apartment in 2011, with a 'shop the home’ concept that has been much emulated worldwide. Using a base of white painted floorboards and white woodwork, Tina fills the space with a rotating selection of wallpapers, fabrics (often from Svenskt Tenn), interesting furniture and striking artwork. While there is much of Scandinavian origin in the space, Tina also embraces a wide range of heritages, making use of her extensive vintage American quilt collection and the flags created by the Fante communities of Ghana. The sum of all these parts manages to feel at once clean, crisp and airy in true Scandi style, but also visually interesting and deeply comfortable.

Sweden has a rich design history that extends far beyond Frank and Svenskt Tenn, however, and other periods and styles are increasingly coming to the forefront of the wider design consciousness. The eighteenth century saw some heavily decorated styles influenced by France, as a boom in Swedish prosperity allowed the sweeping curves and elaborate carving of the rococo style to take their place in royal and aristocratic households. The relatively understated style of the Swedish rococo chair, with its characteristic pale painted finish, is still immensely popular today. The same combination of intricate detail with soft, washed out colours characterised the Gustavian style of the later eighteenth century, as King Gustav III looked to his contemporary Louis XVI in France and absorbed much of his neoclassical style. We tend not to think of these styles as maximalist, given the paleness of the typical colour palette and the homespun, country aesthetic that eventually emerged out of them, yet in modern interiors they can feel intensely decorative and visually interesting.