Röhsska Museum: Swedish Design, Fashion and Applied Arts in Gothenburg

Behind a red brick facade on Vasagatan in Gothenburg sits a collection that runs from a Baroque chair to a Vivienne Westwood wedding dress, and from Chinese ceramics more than four thousand years old to a Swedish telephone of the 1950s. The Röhsska Museum, Röhsska museet in Swedish and often spelled Rohsska Museum in English, calls itself the Museum of Design and Craft, and it asks a simple question of everything it shows: why does this object look the way it does? For travellers on our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour through Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the museum lies a short walk from the group’s Gothenburg hotel.

Why Gothenburg built a museum of design and craft

The Röhsska Museum belongs to a family of institutions that grew out of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. That fair showed off the industrial capacity of the age, but critics complained that much of what the factories produced was poorly designed, and many feared that machine production would wipe out traditional craft. The answer, across Europe, was the museum of art and industry: a collection of good examples that would teach makers, manufacturers and the public what quality looked like. The Röhsska Museum’s own history begins the list with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, opened in 1852, followed by museums in Helsinki in 1874, Oslo in 1876 and Copenhagen in 1890. Copenhagen’s institution, known today as Designmuseum Denmark, is part of the story told in our guide to Danish design and its cabinetmaking tradition.

Sweden, as the Röhsska Museum itself admits, came relatively late. In Gothenburg the idea took shape in the 1880s, when the art society Sällskapet Gnistan staged an exhibition of craft objects lent by local collectors and the public response suggested a permanent museum. The driving figure was Wilhelm Berg, an accountant, author and amateur archaeologist, who summed up the taste of the city’s wealthy homes as “lots of luxury, little taste”. The money came from two brothers, Wilhelm Röhss (1843 to 1900) and August Röhss (1836 to 1904), who had made a fortune in timber exports and cotton imports and left funds in their wills for a building, its furnishing and its future collections. Work on the building and the collection began in 1904, and the museum opened in 1916.

That origin explains the museum’s character. Gothenburg was a merchant and shipping city rather than a royal capital, and its museum of design was founded by trading money to improve everyday taste, not to display a court’s treasures. Our article on Sweden’s history and culture sets the city in that wider national story.

A building of hand-made red brick

The museum building was designed by the architect Carl Westman (1866 to 1936) in the National Romantic style typical of Swedish architecture in the 1910s. It is built of red, hand-made bricks chosen to give the exterior life and to recall medieval building traditions, and many of the bricks in the facade carry small carved designs, some commissioned and some created by Westman himself. He worked closely with the museum’s first curator, Axel Nilsson, who argued that a museum of art and industry should not be an enjoyment “solely for the upper class”.

The building grew with its collection. A functionalist extension by Melchior Wernstedt, designed for temporary exhibitions, was finished in 1937, and a second extension by Sven Brolid followed between 1957 and 1962, so the site carries three architectural moments in one block. The neighbourhood is part of the story too: the museum stands between the former Chalmers building on Vasagatan, which houses the Valand Academy, and the former school of Svenska Slöjdföreningen on Kristinelundsgatan, which houses the School of Design and Craft. Design education and the design museum have shared the same few streets ever since.

Design Stories: 150 years of everyday objects

The heart of any visit is the permanent exhibition Design Stories, which occupies an entire floor of the museum. Across 800 square metres and five galleries it brings together more than 500 objects from the collection, mainly Nordic design from the mid-1800s to today, arranged by theme rather than by date. Themes such as innovation, consumption and belonging cut across materials, so that glass, cabinets, jewellery and ceramics each become a different window onto the same question.

The range is wide. The museum’s own list of highlights includes a complete modernist kitchen by the French designer Charlotte Perriand, Vivienne Westwood’s wedding dress Chaos Point, the tapestry Ogift mor (“Unwed Mother”) by the weaver Hannah Ryggen, and embroideries by the Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba. Under the innovation theme sit an SKF bearing, bentwood furniture and pleating in several materials. Several examples of the Ericofon, the one-piece telephone Ericsson launched in the mid-1950s and nicknamed “the Cobra”, show how a technical object became a piece of domestic design. Sketches, material samples, films and interviews explain the thinking behind the objects, down to why the push button at a pedestrian crossing looks the way it does.

This is where the museum’s approach is clearest. Rather than presenting a parade of famous names, it treats design as something that shapes daily life, from the font on a page to the shirt on your back, and asks visitors to read objects as evidence of how people lived, worked and wanted to be seen. A studio space within the exhibition, Super Ö, is set aside for collaborations.

Fashion, textiles and the designers in focus

Fashion is one of the three fields, with design and craft, that make up the museum’s collection of some 50,000 objects. The museum collects garments and accessories as well as other material connected with fashion, and it presents them mainly through temporary exhibitions that place clothing in artistic and historical context. Textiles run through the permanent displays as well, from Ryggen’s tapestry to printed furnishing fabrics.

The museum’s online “designers in focus” series shows which names it considers central to the collection, among them the textile designer Viola Gråsten, the architect and designer Josef Frank, the interior designer Estrid Ericson, the ceramic designers Stig Lindberg and Lisa Larson, and the textile artist Pasi Välimaa. For travellers, this is a useful bridge to the next stage of the tour. On day eleven the group drives about an hour to Borås to visit the Swedish School of Textiles, and our guide to Swedish textiles in Borås, from weaving school to design research picks up the story there.

More than 500 chairs

The museum’s collection includes more than 500 chairs, and around 145 of them are displayed in an open storage gallery in the auditorium, running from the seventeenth century to the present. The chair suits a design museum well, because it is expected to be comfortable, practical and good to look at all at once, and the museum’s selection includes, in its own words, everything from ergonomic chairs to chairs that are practically impossible to sit on.

Walking the length of the display is a short course in Swedish taste. A dark-stained birch chair with leather upholstery from the end of the seventeenth century shows Dutch and French influence; a birch chair probably made by the chair maker Erik Larsson in Lindome around 1800 represents the restrained Gustavian style; and a chair from the 1830s in the Karl Johan style, Sweden’s version of Empire, shows a later fashion arriving from France. The twentieth century brings Alvar Aalto’s Chair 51 from the 1930s, Bruno Mathsson’s Eva armchair of 1941 in bent laminated wood with woven straps, Peter Opsvik’s saddle-inspired Capisco desk chair of 1984, and Anna von Schewen’s Hug chair of 2002. Because the gallery doubles as conference space, it is temporarily closed to visitors during booked conferences.

The eighteenth century and the collections from East Asia

Three further permanent displays look back to the roots of modern design. 18th-Century Design & Craft treats the eighteenth century as the start of modern design history, a period when objects were made both by individual artisans and in early workshops that divided labour to produce larger series. Its centrepiece is a drawing room furnished with eighteenth-century interiors from an apartment on Regeringsgatan in Stockholm. A period room called the Baroque Chamber shows the opposite ideal, opulence and drama rather than restraint.

East Asian craft has been shown on the museum’s third floor since it opened in 1916, and the floor has been refurbished as Inspiration East Asia. The Chinese collection began with an expedition the museum commissioned in 1912 and 1913, led by the botanist Thorild Wulff, who arrived in China in the year the emperor abdicated. The oldest pieces are vessels from the Banshan tombs dating to around 2500 BC, and the museum describes its Chinese holdings as one of the oldest museum collections of their kind in Europe. Today it collects mainly modern craft and design and older Swedish objects, following the ethical code of the International Council of Museums. The display sets these pieces beside Swedish ceramics they influenced, by Lisa Larson and Stig Lindberg among others, and beside contemporary work such as Emma von Brömssen’s Dancing Crane pattern. Three listening stations, called Museum Flow, offer calm audio descriptions of individual objects.

Don’t miss the ground floor on the way out. In the Architecture Hall are two glazed brick reliefs of a lion and a dragon from the throne room of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, and above them a vaulted wooden ceiling inspired by medieval church ceilings, hand-painted by Brocke Blückert and Olle Nordmark when the museum opened. Glass appears throughout the building too, in display cases within Design Stories, a useful prelude to the tour’s days in Småland described in our guide to Kosta Boda and Sweden’s glassworks tradition.

How Gothenburg frames design differently from Stockholm

The Röhsska Museum describes itself as the only museum in Sweden specialising in design and craft, and it is run by the City of Gothenburg’s Culture Management with co-financing from Region Västra Götaland, rather than by the state. That gives it a different voice from the capital’s national institutions. When the tour reaches Stockholm, the day fifteen program includes the Swedish Museum of Architecture and Design and the Moderna Museet on Skeppsholmen, where the emphasis falls on architecture and modern art. In Gothenburg the focus is on the object in the hand: the chair, the cup, the garment and the material it is made from.

The museum also looks forward. Since 1994 it has awarded the Torsten & Wanja Söderberg Prize, a Nordic design award, and the Torsten och Wanja Söderbergs hall is a reading room with international periodicals, a digital archive and furniture by earlier prizewinners such as Mats Theselius, Front Design and Margrethe Odgaard. Visitors can sit in the armchairs and read about the collection. For the way these threads connect across three countries, our learning-led route through Scandinavian design follows the whole journey.

Is the Röhsska (Rohsska) Museum a scheduled visit on the tour?

No. The museum is a free-time option rather than a group visit. On day nine the group has a morning guided tour of Gothenburg, taking in the Haga District, Avenyn and Maritiman, and the afternoon is at leisure; the itinerary lists the Röhsska Museum among several museums within a 10 to 15 minute walk of the hotel, alongside the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the National Museums of World Culture and Göteborgs Konsthall. The afternoon of day ten is also at leisure, after the day’s visit focused on Volvo’s design and engineering story in Gothenburg.

Is entry to the Röhsska Museum included in the tour?

The tour includes all excursions, entrance fees and local guides, but the Röhsska Museum falls in free time rather than in the scheduled program, so ask a Tour Specialist how admission is handled before you travel. Tickets, opening hours and any temporary closures are set by the museum, so check its official website close to your visit.

How easy is the museum to get around?

According to the museum, all floors are reached by lifts, there are no or very low thresholds between galleries, and doors are automatic or propped open. Seating is available on every floor, though not in every gallery, and visitors can borrow a museum stool or a simple wheelchair at reception. The footpath outside the entrance is somewhat uneven because of cobblestones, and large bags are not allowed in the galleries, so use the lockers on the basement floor.

How much walking does the Gothenburg stay involve?

The tour is graded Level 2 (Moderate): travellers should be able to carry their own luggage, use stairs and manage three to five hours of physical activity a day, equivalent to walking up to about 8 kilometres on uneven ground. In Gothenburg, day eleven adds a drive of about an hour to Borås. If you want to talk through how a museum afternoon fits your pace, a Tour Specialist can help.

A museum for slow looking

The Röhsska Museum rewards an unhurried afternoon. Its strength is not one famous object but the way it connects a Babylonian brick, a Gustavian chair, a Chinese jar and a Swedish telephone into a single argument about how design shapes ordinary life. For mature travellers on a small group journey of up to 16 travellers, it is a fitting pause between the furniture of Copenhagen and the textiles and glass of Sweden. For practical questions about travelling in the country, from currency to the places worth seeing, our answers to common questions about Sweden are a good place to start.