LARS SJOBERG dates his obsession with old Swedish houses to 1951, when, at age 10, his mother gave him a book from his grandfather's library on manors and villas from centuries past.
''For two years after that, I was always drawing houses and making models of them,'' he said. ''And some looked like the earliest and smallest of the six I own today, a red timber house called Sorby in a tiny village of that name.''
Built like an American log cabin in the 17th century, Sorby, about 130 miles southwest of here, was updated a century later to look like a manor house: the windows were enlarged and the grass roof replaced by a mansard roof, with small glass panes in the short wall between the two levels, to admit light into the attic. ''In some ways it's my favorite house,'' Mr. Sjoberg said.
Some people collect Hula-Hoops, cookie jars, Japanese screens or even racing cars; Mr. Sjoberg collects houses. What began as a childhood fancy became a reality when he needed places to live, and it evolved into a compulsion when he saw old houses about to be torn down.
His passion to save houses is perhaps rooted in his father's belief that he could make and repair most anything. His father taught wood and metal crafting at the boarding school near Stockholm that Lars Sjoberg and his two sisters attended and where the family lived. ''He taught me that everything is possible for a carpenter,'' Mr. Sjoberg said. ''I'm trying but not always succeeding.''Continue reading the main story
When Mr. Sjoberg was a teenager, the family built a simple modern house near the school. ''Even then, I longed for something old-fashioned,'' he said.
His interest deepened when he studied art history and architecture at Stockholm University. After he graduated in 1965 and became an assistant curator of art at the National Museum, he grew even more determined to make old houses part of his life. So he and his bride, Ursula, also a budding art historian, began living in a timber house on his family's property while they hunted for an old manor house they could call home.
The first house Mr. Sjoberg bought, 35 years ago, was Regnaholm, a splendid 18th-century white and yellow manor house that he now says was too large, too expensive and too distant from Stockholm -- 120 miles southwest in Ostergotlund. But the house was facing demolition, so he and his family pooled their resources and bought it as a vacation house. At the time, Swedish preservationists were not yet protesting the razing of 18th-century buildings because, as Mr. Sjoberg said, many still existed and preserving old houses seemed elitist to those campaigning for low-cost housing.
The couple searched for nine years before they found their perfect house, Odenslunda, a five-room manor house in Uppland, only 18 miles from Stockholm. Built in 1775 for the military, it was, Mr. Sjoberg said, ''the largest type made for a colonel.'' The house was made of timbers, stone and bricks and covered with wooden vertical siding and had an attic.
Today, Mr. Sjoberg, 59, a senior curator at the museum, uses his houses, built between 1680 and 1830, for his workshops on architectural restoration, a program he conducts for Stockholm University. In addition to manors, he owns an 18th-century Italianate villa, an 1830's country inn and an 1810 building that housed the families of factory workers.
In the early 90's, Mr. Sjoberg was a consultant to Ikea and designed a line of traditional Swedish furniture, lighting and accessories for the chain. He has written several books on Swedish furniture; his best-known work, ''The Swedish Room,'' a collaboration with Mrs. Sjoberg, who is now a curator of the Royal Collections, includes four of their houses.
All of Mr. Sjoberg's houses reflect the French-influenced Gustavian style of the 18th century. The look was shaped in part by the architect Carl Harleman, who had visited Versailles before designing the interiors of the Royal Palace in Stockholm. He brought back to Sweden the mansard roof, tall narrow multipaned windows, crystal chandeliers, pastel and white color schemes, neo-Classical furnishings, floral patterned fabrics and wallpapers and gilded rococo embellishments.
This style flourished in Swedish palaces and homes, and lives on in turn-of-the-century paintings by Carl Larsson and in the films of Ingmar Bergman. Lars Sjoberg is also reviving the style in the rooms of palaces he has decorated and the houses he has collected, using techniques he learned from master craftsmen decades ago or discovered on his own or through teaching.
''My students, all 20 of them, practice restoration,'' he said. ''They are learning how to mix plaster and apply it thinly to the walls the way they did in the 18th century.'' They also stucco ceilings and dismantle and reassemble porcelain stoves to repair them. The most difficult task, he says, is scraping layers of paint from walls, to get down to the original surfaces. ''You have to know what you should look for -- not the raw wood, but the first layer of paint,'' he said. ''And you have to know what to do with what you find: don't repaint the wall. Instead, when you strip off the layers, leave the original painted surface, worn though it may seem.''
The secret to restoration, he said, often has more to do with what you remove than what you add. The windows at Regnaholm, he says, still have the original glass panes. Nearly clear but lightly tinted green, they produce a wondrous light when left uncovered on sunny days.
''And at Sorby, all the rooms still have the painted canvas wall decoration, from 250 years ago, faded but intact,'' he said. ''The Gustavian lightness is back again.''Continue reading the main story