The Quiet Theatre of Craft: Elevators at Stockholm’s Stadshotell Hotel
Vertical Stories in Wood: Klara Knutsson’s Intarsia Elevators at Stadshotell”
Step inside the elevator at Stockholm’s newly opened Stadshotell and the ride becomes something more than vertical transit. Against the walnut-paneled cab, a suite of luminous wood inlays — roses blooming across skylines, cranes tilting above rooftops, human figures walking a stylized Stockholm — unfold like a storybook carved from timber. The panels, painstakingly composed by artist Klara Knutsson, turn a quiet, everyday journey into a miniature cultural encounter.
The panels are executed in intarsia, a centuries-old marquetry technique in which thin veneers of wood are cut, shaped, and inlaid to create pictorial surfaces. Where marble mosaic tells its tale in stone, intarsia speaks in grain. Knutsson plays with contrasts: maple and birch bring pale light; walnut and mahogany deepen shadows; oak softens transitions. Flowers bloom in scarlet-toned woods, while pale veneers sketch architecture and bridges.
The effect is neither loud nor ornamental for ornament’s sake. Instead, it is narrative inlay — using Stockholm’s motifs, its cranes, spires, and riverbanks, to root the elevator in the city itself.
The Stadshotell, redesigned by Studio Escapist, is an ode to understatement. The interiors embrace traditional woodworking, Arts & Crafts references, and Scandinavian minimalism, a palette of honest materials and precise detailing. In this context, the elevators are not decorative interruptions but continuations of the building’s ethos: craft elevated into experience.
The cab itself is almost monastic in its restraint — walnut paneling runs low around the perimeter, with a darker stone floor grounding the ride. Stainless steel buttons are flush-set in a pared-down plate. Above, small recessed spotlights punctuate the ceiling, their glow catching on the intarsia panels. Everything else recedes, so that Knutsson’s work becomes the narrative surface, the emotional resonance.
Elevators are often framed as neutral boxes — places we pass through without thought. Here, the opposite is true. Knutsson turns the walls into stage flats, scenes unfolding in panels, with passengers cast as actors stepping into a set. The roses, the cranes, the city forms: they animate the ride with a theatrical quality.
This is where Stadshotell makes a claim — that even the most ordinary transitions in a building deserve the grace of craft. The elevator becomes a pause for reflection, a framed canvas that one shares with strangers for the span of a few seconds.
As elevator designers, we know how rare this is. Too often, elevator interiors default to stainless steel, mirrors, or corporate veneers. They are functional, yes, but stripped of cultural specificity. Stadshotell’s approach reminds us that the elevator cab is also a room — one of the most intensely experienced rooms in any hotel, touched by every guest multiple times a day. Why should it not be invested with the same craft as a bar, a suite, or a lobby?
The collaboration with a local artist underscores another point: elevators are not just technical packages, they are cultural surfaces. Inviting an artist to design panels is not “extra,” it is recognition that vertical travel deserves a story.
There is something distinctly Scandinavian in this synthesis: the joining of modest luxury, inherited craft, and contemporary calm. Knutsson’s intarsia does not shout; it whispers. Yet in its quietness, it asserts a position that resonates beyond this hotel: that architecture’s smaller spaces — elevators, corridors, thresholds — can carry as much narrative weight as the grand halls.
In an age where hotels compete on spectacle, Stadshotell has chosen something slower and more enduring: a return to wood, hand, and grain. In doing so, it reminds us that even the elevator ride can be a cultural encounter — a vertical theatre where craft, memory, and city intertwine.