House of Culture
Scandinavian Commercial Interior Design: The House of Culture Brief
Scandinavian commercial interior design — applying the material discipline and spatial logic of Nordic residential work to a venue that must simultaneously function as exhibition space, photography studio, creative workplace, and community gathering point — was the central challenge of the House of Culture project. The brief was genuinely multifunctional: a single floor plate needed to serve multiple distinct uses across the week without any single function dominating the character of the space. The risk with multifunctional commercial briefs is that the result reads as a compromise — a room that does many things adequately but nothing particularly well. The goal here was the opposite: a space with a clear identity that happens to accommodate multiple programmes.
The answer was a consistent Scandinavian material palette held across every element — white walls, natural oak, abundant greenery, controlled natural light — that creates a coherent visual register regardless of how the space is configured for any given event or shoot. The palette does not change with the programme; the furniture and equipment do. More on how consistent material logic functions across a project: timeless materials in interior design.
Exhibition Space and Cyclorama: Architecture for Creative Work
The cyclorama is the project's most architecturally specific element. Most photography cycloramas are treated as pure infrastructure — white boxes inserted into existing rooms as functional afterthoughts. Here the cyclorama is integrated into the spatial composition: its curved white wall reads as a design element from the main exhibition area, and its placement at the end of the principal sightline from the entrance gives it a visual weight that anchors the room. When in use for shoots, it disappears into the work. When not in use, it functions as a sculptural white surface that bounces light into the deeper areas of the space.
The main exhibition area operates on the same logic. The ceiling height and the positioning of the primary light sources — both natural and artificial — were calibrated to make artwork readable without spot-lighting or track systems that would fix the space into a permanent gallery mode. The lighting infrastructure is neutral enough to support different hanging configurations and different scales of work, from large-format canvases to smaller display arrangements. This is what separates a designed exhibition space from a white-walled room: the decisions that enable flexibility without making flexibility the only quality of the space.
Bookshelf Wall and the Blue Painting: Cultural Identity Through Display
The full-height bookshelf wall is the project's most residential gesture — and deliberately so. A cultural venue that references domestic warmth, through books, through objects, through the accumulated evidence of intellectual life, reads differently from one that performs institutional neutrality. The bookshelf signals that this is a space where ideas are worked through, not only displayed. It also solves a practical problem: storage for materials, publications, and reference works that any active cultural programme generates, integrated into the architecture rather than managed through freestanding furniture.
The large blue painting is the space's tonal anchor. Its particular shade — saturated but not aggressive, cool but not cold — sets the chromatic register that the rest of the Scandinavian palette responds to. White walls read differently adjacent to a strong blue than they do in isolation; the contrast makes the white feel considered rather than default. The painting also demonstrates something important about how art functions in a designed space: it is not decoration applied to a finished room but a material element that participates in the spatial composition. This is the distinction between a cultural space and a commercial space with art on the walls. See how we approached a similar discipline in the Alexanderplatz Office.
Kitchen and Wood: Scandinavian Material Warmth in a Commercial Setting
The kitchen is the space's most direct statement of its multifunctional ambition. In most commercial venues, a kitchen is a service element — hidden, functional, separate from the public areas. Here it is visible and integrated, finished in natural wood that continues the material register established in the exhibition and bookshelf areas. Making the kitchen a designed room rather than a utility space signals the venue's intention: this is a place for sustained occupation, for gatherings that extend beyond a single-use event, for the kind of cultural programming that involves people eating together as well as looking at work together.
The wood specification throughout — cabinetry, shelving, structural details — is consistent in species and finish, a Scandinavian principle applied with particular care in a commercial context where the temptation is to treat different areas with different materials as a way of demarcating zones. The single-material approach does the opposite: it makes the space feel larger and more coherent, and it creates a warmth that prevents the Scandinavian minimalism from reading as cold. For the approach to lighting that supports this kind of material-led interior, see our lighting strategies guide.
Terrace and Greenery: The Biophilic Extension
The planted terrace extends the venue's floor plate into the exterior and introduces the project's most direct biophilic element. In Scandinavian interior design, the connection to nature is not achieved primarily through houseplants or natural materials — though both are present here — but through spatial planning that makes the boundary between inside and outside permeable. The terrace is not a separate outdoor area appended to the building; it is a continuation of the interior, visible from the main exhibition space and accessible in a way that makes it feel like another room rather than an external amenity.
The greenery on the terrace and the planting integrated into the interior serve a dual function: they soften the hard surfaces of the Scandinavian palette — white walls, oak, concrete — and they provide acoustic absorption that makes the space more comfortable for extended use. A venue that hosts talks, workshops, and social gatherings needs to manage sound differently from a gallery that primarily expects quiet contemplation. The planting contributes to this without requiring acoustic treatment that would compromise the visual register. For cultural and commercial interior design projects, we welcome a conversation about your brief. See also our commercial work in the Loomly Customs showroom.
