Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the pantheon of Swedish monarchs, King Oscar I (1844-1859) barely rates a mention. An early reformer, the second Bernadotte lost his nerve in the cross-currents of the era\u2019s revolutionary uprisings. After he died, his widow Queen Josefina erected, in his honour, a home for poor elderly women of the upper class, often penniless widows. Designed by architect Per Ulrik Stenhammar and built between 1873 and 1875, the handsome three-storey structure with two wings facing a central courtyard was one of the first buildings in Stockholm to have rooms opening off long corridors lit by arched windows. Charitable but by no means miserable, the home in\u00a0Stockholm\u2019s edgy southern district of S\u00f6dermalm provided solace for almost 80 years.But after the elderly residents moved out in the early 1950s, the stately building suffered decades of vicissitudes. Situated directly on top of a new rail tunnel, it sat empty for years \u2013 not precisely unloved, but run down and seemingly stranded on a grid of steel girders protecting its foundations from the earthworks underneath. Eventually the works were completed, and the city was ready to sell the building \u2013 but on the proviso that it be converted into a public space.So the landmark property has been reborn as a 32-room and suite hotel, its elaborate metal roof with characteristic rounded dormer windows again gleaming, and its plastered fa\u00e7ade repainted in its original sandstone colour. On the tympanum above the elegant front entrance, original gilded letters spell out its former name: Konung Oscar I:s Minne (King Oscar I\u2019s Memory). Below it is the building\u2019s new one: Stockholm Stadshotell.\u00a0In English it means \u201ccity hotel\u201d, but for a Swede, stadshotell conjures up something more romantic \u2013 a certain nostalgia, a bourgeois elegance. It also signals just what sort of establishment this is; so much so that when S\u00f6dermalm\u2019s fiercely local residents learnt the name, they were relieved. They had feared their cherished building would become an exclusive destination hotel largely closed to its neighbours; instead, they got a contemporary version of the family-run inns that dot the country \u2013 social hubs, or statts as they are colloquially known.\u201cThe statt is where you go for your first date, where you take grandma for her 70th birthday. It\u2019s the living room for the city,\u201d says Fredrik Carlstr\u00f6m, a creative director who is one of the hotel\u2019s five founding partners. The New York-based Swede, who develops brands and real estate, is fascinated with the art of ambience. \u201cIn hotels and real estate there\u2019s this trend of who designed it,\u00a0who\u2019s the architect, but I believe the people who really are great at creating a vibe are restaurateurs.\u201d He\u2019s long wondered what would happen if a hotel was run by a cohort of the best of them, applying all their knowledge of hospitality to the entire guest experience: \u201cTo put people first and let design follow as a backdrop,\u201d as he says.With this statt Carlstr\u00f6m is putting that theory into practice, having teamed up with Johan Agrell, Jon\u00a0Lacotte and Dan K\u00e4llstr\u00f6m, the trio behind much-vaunted neighbourhood haunts Babette, Caf\u00e9 Nizza, Schmaltz and Tengu. They didn\u2019t have to go far to find each other: Carlstr\u00f6m had been hanging out in their restaurants for years, soaking up their special sauce. \u201cI visit every time I come from New York. Babette especially feels like a higher-end cafeteria at an art college.\u201d In 2020, when Agrell told him about a wonderful heritage building in the heart of S\u00f6der (as locals call it) that had come up for rent and would make the perfect hotel, Carlstr\u00f6m was instantly sold. He recruited his friend and colleague Ian Nicholson, a veteran US hotel manager and developer whose CV includes The Standard, The Mercer, Chateau Marmont, Hudson and Soho Grand hotels. Their financial partner, Karl-Johan Persson, the third generation to head up Swedish retail behemoth H&M (and a Babette regular), likewise needed little persuasion.The brief was succinct \u2013 a house where you can eat and sleep, but where the focus is flipped. \u201cA restaurant with rooms rather than a hotel, that must provide somewhere to eat breakfast,\u201d says Agrell, adding that opening the bistro before the hotel, as they did in December, underscored their particular difference. Although the hotel\u2019s name may not mean anything to a non-Swede, he says it signals what they want to achieve. \u201cIt\u2019s like anti-branding in a way. Stockholm Stadshotell is very institutional, which helps to send a message that it\u2019s the product, it\u2019s the food, it\u2019s the wine, it\u2019s the service, it\u2019s the inclusiveness; that\u2019s what we want.\u201d\u00a0Everything follows from there. Even the nomenclature is straightforward, if not prosaic: there\u2019s Bistro, with tiles up the walls, tables bolted to the floor and a daily handwritten blackboard menu; Salongen, with banquettes and Sm\u00e5land chairs; the Bar; and the high-end restaurant, Matsalen \u2013 \u201cdining room\u201d in Swedish. Just like home, where you eat in the kitchen every day and use the matsalen for special occasions. Quite special, in this case: Matsalen is in the former chapel, complete with vaulted ceilings, Ionic pilasters, golden angels and marbleised walls recently repainted by hand. The staff might riff on the formality of fine dining, folding napkins into bishop\u2019s hats, for instance, but this is no hushed temple. The tasting menu is five generous courses, not 15, created under the stewardship of executive chef and Chez Panisse alum Olle Cellton, and served with neither fuss nor ego.\u00a0The hotel\u2019s design \u2013 lobby, salons and rooms \u2013 was overseen by Elin Martin and Michaela Hemlin of Studio Escapist, and aligns with this mindset. A discerning luxury where nothing shouts, and everything is comfortable and beautiful without ever being overwrought; Carlstr\u00f6m alternatingly calls it \u201cShaker Chic\u201d and \u201cMonastic Meets Palazzo\u201d. There are discreet nods to Swedish design history, from Biedermeier-inflected and Swedish Grace to 1940s and \u201950s functionalism. (The curved plywood bench seats in Bistro are a homage to those in the Faith Chapel of Gunnar Asplund\u2019s Woodland Cemetery, widely acknowledged as being Stockholm\u2019s most photogenic bench.) Vintage finds are combined with custom-furniture in richly grained wood, such as burr birch, and upholstered in dense velvet.Thanks to the building itself, there\u2019s a great deal of inherent character, an old energy and humanity that\u2019s still very perceptible even if much of the current interior was built from scratch. There are 150 years of tread marks on the limestone steps on two original curved staircases, and the gracious heritage-protected corridors, with their sightlines to large windows, which in many such projects would have been absorbed into larger hotel rooms. A sense of artistry and craft pervades, from the intarsia marquetry capturing Stockholm motifs in the lift to the traditional Insj\u00f6ns V\u00e4veri woven napkins.\u00a0S\u00f6dermalm is itself a special place; by now gentrified, but still with a hard-working grit, the self-styled creative locus of the city \u2013 the Brooklyn of Stockholm, so to speak, whose residents prefer to socialise in their \u2019hood, says Agrell. He\u2019s not presumptuous enough to suggest he and his partners have created a much-needed social hub, but he\u2019s \u201csuper-proud\u201d if others are saying it. (They are.) It\u2019s early days, but there is a sense of a life beyond the insularity of a luxury hotel, a neighbourhood spirit in which an outsider can share. Lacotte, a proud S\u00f6der local who grew up in the utilitarian station precinct nearby, can\u2019t wait for summer, when he and his crew will turn the courtyard into an Italian-style piazza with wicker chairs and umbrellas, and really throw open the doors.\u00a0stockholmstadshotell.com, from SKr3,500 (about \u20ac325)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the pantheon of Swedish monarchs, King Oscar I (1844-1859) barely rates a mention. An early reformer, the second Bernadotte lost his nerve in the cross-currents of the era\u2019s revolutionary uprisings. After he died, his widow Queen Josefina erected, in his honour, a home<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":292336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-292335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292335"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292337,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292335\/revisions\/292337"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}