Magnus Skogsberg’s Summer Home
Trolldalen, Sweden
The charm begins immediately. The half-moon gravel drive with crushed white rocks bound by the just-tended flower beds and spring-soaked grass; the grays and greens making red and pink petals pop. Or Magnus Skogsberg there at the door, like he’d waited all morning for our arrival. Perpetually tanned, toned, and sporting a slate-gray pompadour—selected from many options available exclusively to him, I assumed. Something baking in the oven converges with the nearby smell of the sea, just past the back hedges and boat dock and little sauna. Magnus stands under the porch’s eave, beneath a carved wooden heart perched above the door. I’m immediately at ease, steps crunching from the drive and onto the porch and into a white-and-beige living room that reminds me of photos in the Sunday New York Times. His husband Leck rushes from the kitchen to say hello.
I could have left, immediately upon arriving, and felt fully satisfied, having confirmed every daydream of a Swedish summer home. A small escape, for long weekends or spontaneous nights, or just to know it’s there. Year after year since I began traveling a few times, annually, to Stockholm, I’d seen friends’ social media posts of garden after garden, weekend after summer weekend, glasses of Aquavit and sun-lit beers, golden bare legs stretched across the edge of the archipelago, picture after picture.
Though three years have passed since visiting Magnus’ red and white house in the tiny village of Trolldalen, I often return to a photo I took that day: Magnus on his back porch picking stems off fresh strawberries and laughing maniacally for some reason—probably amused by my gushing admiration for what was, to him, just another summer Sunday. In his summer home. He’d chilled plenty of nice wine, multiple courses emerged out of nowhere - cheese and fruit, hanger steaks perfectly marinated and medium rare, two types of salad, another bottle of rose, and another, then strawberries and cream in bright sea-blue Swedish ceramic bowls.
As discussed in the Cafe Rival
Stockholm, Sweden
“I only have 15 summers left, I’m a little stressed.” This is Magnus’ response when I ask how he’s doing. He’s shedding layer after layer in various shades of black, and finally removing what looks like a modern riff on a classic boat captain’s hat. Magnus glides when he moves, his limbs choreographed in unison like part of a performance. He’s belly-laughing at his own words and maybe my reaction—15 summers?—interrupting the sober Saturday congregation of chic neighborhood residents tucked inside to hide from an afternoon chill. Eyes look up from cups of coffee and glasses of wine, recognizing Magnus’ moves.
And it’s easy to recognize him. If you watch cable television his wide-eyed smile will bounce across the screen once or twice, part of a long-running Swedish supermarket advertising campaign. He plays a flamboyant grocery clerk prone to pranks and a silk ascot. Or perhaps they’ve seen his show bills pasted across town or his name on marquees. Between late night performances for which he morphs into a sultry drag personality, or one part of a popular duo that translates classic American ballads to Swedish. Or his self-produced YouTube series, “Tjench,” or change, on which he interviews people he most admires for their own metamorphoses. Magnus the cult celeb, and I, a jet lagged American with recording devices, far too few layers, and no commercial work to my credit.
He’s come from who knows where to meet me, and I from just next door: a former cinema-cum-hotel renovated by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and draped in an art deco interior honoring its past life. Magnus has played its still-popular theatre. It’s my preferred residence that, after years of staying, indulges my desire to be an actual resident.
“I did the math,” Magnus continued. “That’s probably how many summers I have left.” He laughed again, with slightly less diaphragm. With the looks and energy of someone twenty years his junior, he can’t be more than 55, I thought…which would put him at 70 after his self-proclaimed summers expire, still well within his prime. A tragedy really.
I looked at my notes: Why did you buy it/When did you buy it?/How did you buy it?
“I saw the little heart carved above the front door and decided, ‘I can die here.’” I hadn’t considered it as anything other than a heart when I visited, figuring he’d added it during a routine weekend of maintenance. A whim. A piece collected while antiquing. But it was there for him. “It was early to be thinking about death.” Yes, I thought.
“The home wasn’t an investment, it was more like a living thing…I was a bird creating a little nest.” As Magnus described the first few years living with the house it seemed less like a bird to a nest and more like a child to a womb. While he labored to renovate the bones, he reconstructed memories recalled from his family’s former summer home in Skåne in the south of Sweden, resuscitating as much as one can when too much time’s passed.
He bought the home at just 35, with most all his money, after his divorce, after his mother died, which was long after his father committed suicide, which happened when Magnus was a boy. He bought the home during the AIDS epidemic when everyone else seemed to be dying.
“I pretend it’s my childhood home.” With the front door always open he reminisced, hopping across the archipelago via a little aluminum boat to see friends on adjacent islands. When the neighbors dropped by with food for an afternoon chat and cousins stayed for long weekends. He loves the way the summer home sounds—bathed in lullaby of the sea’s ebbs and flows, wind through trees, distant hollers of hello and children laughing, and then the silence, the blessed break from city noise. “It’s so quiet I rarely play any music.” A bit shocking for a who I imagine walks alongside his own soundtrack of show tunes and sultry ballads.
My coffee was cold when I realized Magnus hadn’t yet ordered—barely breathing between sentences and stories, laughs and long pauses. I wondered how often he talks about the home.
“Growing up, both my mother and father believed home was a reflection of self. There was an ambition for good design and color. That stuck with me. If there’s no thought put into a home, with things just lying everywhere, it really hurts me—there’s a life inside a home.” His pupils dribbled sideways as if scanning the spectrum of homes he’d seen throughout his life. “I would choke to death in a minute.”
“When I bought it I knew I could be whole there. I could heal.” The home was not only the beginning of a new chapter, but a symbol the start of his and Leck’s relationship. An investment in the fullest sense. “We’d only had sex twice!” Magnus added, not waiting for a reaction. Leck, uninterested in country living and barely a boyfriend to Magnus ended up assisting with a down payment. I noted the sex must have been compelling.
“Leck saw that I was sad, and he said, ‘If you buy this house will you be happy?’ He looked at me, then said, ‘I’ll put the money in your account tomorrow.’” Today, Leck is the home’s lovable curmudgeon to Magnus’ comedian—fretting about the kitchen, tending to little scratches in the floors or plants to repot.
I replayed my visit, walking through the front door, across the cozy living room dotted with Magnus’ namesake Skogsberg&Smart glass hurricane lamps housing candles of various sizes. Another of Magnus’ endless side projects. He launched the company based entirely on his fear that a forgotten or fallen candle would set fire to his summer home. Little luxuries arranged just so, warding off catastrophe. The living room ushered us into a small kitchen where Leck efficiently washed, chopped, then organized ingredients for our lunch. The morning fight and our still silence slowly faded in the light of the afternoon.
“When people are there I feel like I’m sharing a part of me. I love opening the door.”
I asked if the home had any downsides—What’s wrong with the place, I’d written. I hoped for a barely-bad example he had to half-invent to satisfy my question. The floor in the entry has an unsolvable creak. Windows are drafty. Or, the neighbor practices opera, poorly, at six in the morning.
“There are too many stairs. I recently hurt my back and I began looking at the home very differently. I am so scared of dying, of being sick. And now I’m thinking, ‘Can I be in this place when I’m old? Will it work?’” He stopped. “So I guess we’re now shrinking the time there by 10 years!” he laughed, “five summers left.”
“My father was like that. He had a catastrophic feeling about his life. When he was still young, we moved to a home where there were no staircases. He thought, ‘In 50 years, I’ll be in a wheelchair.’ He was more practical than me. But now I think it might be hard to die in Trolldallen. There are too many stairs.”
I wondered how much like his dad Magnus is, or how much his dad like him. All I knew of his father were the effects his suicide had on Magnus’ own life: on the bright side, likely fueling his relentless joie de vive, but also responsible for this ever presence of death, finding its way into something as carefree as a summer home.
There’s a long pause in the recording, right here. You can hear the bustle of saucers and cups and popping corks and subtle Swedish conversations blurring together.
My voice on the recording cuts through the background, asking how much of the happiness you feel in this place is connected to the happiness you felt in the summer home as a child?
“I think it’s everything.”
“The sadness and the sorrow or the injuries I had from my father’s suicide; so many things I’ve done in my life have been to soothe that.”
Even if you have to make your own nest, it’s a nest nonetheless, I thought.
The last of the afternoon sun gave way to a dull evening gray, then to light rain. Winter’s first reveal.
It struck me that I should have invited myself to the house for this interview. It’s just a short drive from Stockholm and I’m sure Magnus could have employed my help to clear some leaves or finish a half-drunk bottle of wine before it went bad. There isn’t a bad time to be buoyed. To be soothed.
Our conversation turned to our current work projects, mutual friends, and the little flat he and Leck are renovating in Berlin. Magnus replaced his layers and we had a long hug goodbye promising to find time soon and of course visit the home if I’m in Stockholm next summer. He walked toward whatever was next, and I back inside the hotel.
I poured a glass of beer from the mini fridge and sunk into the familiarity of the room, designed just like the others on floors above and below, which I’ve stayed in so many times. The way it smelled, the sounds of evening errands rising from the street outside. I remembered the first time I stayed there. And summer nights when I’d lay wide awake, jet legged and spun around by the sun which stays in the sky till 3 a.m. When the hotel was filled with Christmas and I wished I didn’t have to return to my home.
“Don’t we all want to be home,” Magnus had said in the cafe. And though he’d poured his own heart into the home, its true appeal had little to do with walls or flowers or stairs, but what it stood for. Not a physical place, but the feeling you hope for, to fill the hollowest of limbs. Like summer returning just when you need it most. Like a bird to a nest. A place to rest between what was and will be.