Really old house in Sweden Karlskrona (LOTS of pics)

[foraloysius]

Without pictures from the outside it's hard to determine what style it really is. In the 1930's a movement started that was called functionalism. It was the dominant movement for house design after that. Mid century modern is a typical American movement, that style name was unknown in Sweden.

 

[fredriksam]

foraloysius:Sadly i didnt took any pictures of the house outside. However its the last house in a rather big collection of houses. This house is also the oldest because before the 60´s the rest of the place were the newer houses is was just an empty space not used. Te other houses are built between 1965-1970.

I think the old house fits in the category functionalism. Its built in a way that works very well whre the kitchen is and the bathrooms are and all that.

I asked the friend who helped and he says they fixed some electrical stuff in 1968 but hasnt done other electrical fixes or repairs.

You were also very right about the metal washing machine. It was a Bohus. From the start i guess they had the Bohus spin drier as well. I include this post with a good picture of a Bohus machine and a spin drier as well. Both machines were made approx 1956-1958.

 

[iej]

Interesting mid century house. I definitely wouldn’t call it old. It should be really nice once it’s refurbished.

The hatch in the bathroom is a bit mysterious. I know a lot of 1950s houses here used to have the hot press / airing cupboard in a hallway, which had a second door that opened into the main bathroom, so you could easily grab a nicely warm towels… wonder if it could be some kind of heated closet?[this post was last edited: 1/6/2022-20:41]

 

[foraloysius]

More about the old washer in the basement here:

https://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?89261_9~1

 

[iej]

That’s very industrial looking machine, more like what I would have expected to see in a light commercial context than a house.

The so called “utility house” and the “garden city” movement hit here in the 1920s which is when we started to see homes with practical, easy to maintain layouts, but they tended to be probably a lot less practically designed than in Scandinavia or the US in that era, as least from what I’ve read anyway.

Architects of that era here didn’t prioritise the kitchen as a centre piece of urban house design. That only starts to happen in the 1950s and from that point on kitchens tended to get bigger, more practical, often more elaborate and became much more of a focal point around which everything else flows.

Before that, the tendency was to try to make them disappear as a functional room that wasn’t seen as something to show off. It was probably because leading architects tended to have grown up in grand circumstances, with little understanding of how a small/average family home might function beyond a theoretical one, and almost all of them were men. So you ended up with nice Edwardian houses designed by aloof Victorian gentlemen, who tended to see kitchens as an afterthought. They were big into creating garden suburbs though, and you’d find most of the homes are long since remodelled inside, but that’s also why a lot of houses of that era (in their original layouts) also tended to have no laundry room / utility areas, so the laundry machines (when they arrived) tended to originally be in the kitchen, or the garage.

From what I gather Scandinavian design was a few decades ahead of us on that kind of thing.

That’s an example of a 1920s street in suburban on the Northside of Dublin:

[this post was last edited: 1/7/2022-08:40]