Arctic Circle Luxe: Oscar Kylberg And Prince Carl Philip Bernadotte Of Sweden Design A ‘Midsummer’ Suite In Jukkasjärvi’s Icehotel

Oscar Kylberg and his partner, Prince Carl Philip Bernadotte — formally, also the Duke of Värmland and the son of Sweden’s reigning monarch, King Carl XVI Gustaf — have been making a splash in the hothouse of European commercial design right out of the gate, since they founded their boutique Stockholm design firm, Bernadotte+Kylberg, in 2012.

The gentlemen are close. Both attended Forsbergs, the top Swedish design university, and are the sort of ebulliently brainy sorts who don’t believe any idea is worth its salt until they shred it to bits to see if it can withstand the pain.

“Every day,” Kylberg has been quoted as saying, “is groundhog day.”

When I confront him with the alleged epigram, he said, with fine, dry, bemused-Einstein air, “Well, it sounds like something I would say.”

In other words, he may have let it fly to this or that ink-stained wretch, or, it could be apocryphal. The gentlemen claim they learned that whole idea-lab shredding process at Forsbergs, but it’s easy to see that they had that in them before they got to the school. By now, Bernadotte is the godfather to one of Kylberg’s kids, and the team has been busting out with new designs in just about every possible field — from stemware to fashion and back — so that they tend tend to finish each other’s thoughts in a well-mannered, witty sort of way. When you chat with them both at once, as this reporter did, it’s like playing hacky-sack with a couple of Premier League soccer players as they twirl and skip around while keeping one of those little bean bags in the air indefinitely.

Berdadotte and Kylberg have just designed, built, and personally tested a suite in Sweden’s famous Icehotel, the hotel and resort on the Torne River in the charming Arctic hamlet of Jukkasjärvi, about a hundred and twenty five miles as the crow flies north of the Arctic Circle. The town sits up next to a national park in that topmost salient of Sweden that meets the top of Norway and Finland. North of that is, well, the ocean and the Arctic.

Each March, the icemasters of the hotel harvest ice from the Torne in two-ton blocks. Many long tons of it. This they warehouse over the nominal Arctic summer while they invite artists and designers from around the world to drop on up to Jukkasjärvi and build each year’s hotel.

For the faint of heart who don’t feature sleeping in minus 5 Centigrade (23 Fahrenheit) even on a luscious pile of reindeer skins, there is what they call a “warm” hotel on the property. Come April, the rooms made of ice slowly melt as the ice is harvested from the clear-running Torne for next year’s collection of suites. The Icehotel people are excellent at this. They’ve been harvesting the ice, building the hotel, and letting it melt for the last thirty-two years.

They’ve recently added a wing called Icehotel 365, composed of suites that aren’t allowed to melt come spring, and it’s there that the principals of Bernadotte+Kylberg took up the saws and the chisels. Put differently, their suite will be there for the foreseeable future, bookable well through 2022 until, that is, the masters of ice decide to let it melt. The fishing in the Torne, incidentally, is quite excellent, so that it’s possible in the (slightly) warmer months to pack the tackle and make the sixteen hour, thousand-mile drive up to Jukkasjärvi from Stockholm.

“So, when they called us up to invite us to do a suite,” says Prince Carl Philip, “we were very happy, but then we sort of looked at each other and said, ‘What are we gonna do?’”

“Actually we said what the HELL are we gonna do,” Kylberg chimes in. “Then we thought, how the HELL are we going to do it.”

Bernadotte says, “Then we thought we have to have something really Swedish, I mean, to do something that represents what Swedes treasure the most and to work that into the suite. The one thing that Swedes love, just about more than anything else, is midsummer, when everything is in bloom. It’s so short here, the season.”

“Which is how we got to the idea of putting the flowers literally into blocks of ice, sort of like box frames, and making the room out of them,” Kylberg says.

“They’ve been doing this up there for thirty years,” says Prince Carl Philip, “and nobody had ever thought of putting flowers into the ice. So, we knew we had to be able to to see through the ice to the flowers, which meant we wanted the ice with the fewest bubbles. The founder of the Icehotel knows the Torne so well that he actually showed us the spot in the river where the current is moving but smooth enough so that the ice doesn’t have that many. Our ice comes from that spot.”

The process of getting the flowers into the ice is complex, as seen above. First, the bottom of the box frame is prepared, then the flowers are sprayed with water, which instantly freezes, and the top is then fitted in and that is also sealed with water, which obligingly freezes.

“It’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream,” says Prince Carl Philip, limning Shakespeare. “In fact I booked it for myself and my family for Christmas. I just thought, I want us, my wife and children, to wake up in this place on Christmas morning, and have all these flowers around us.”

The burning question — if that can be said of a suite made of ice, is when the flowers, which are cut, will need to be changed.

“We don’t know,” says Kylberg, chuckling. “Four months? Five? Nobody’s ever done this before.”

“I think the fact that they’re sprayed keeps them bright,” says Prince Carl Philip. “At least for now. I was expecting the white blooms perhaps to fade a bit, but they haven’t. The process is a little bit like freeze-drying, but wet. I mean, we put them in in early November, so they’ve been there a good two months now and they’re fine.”