Studio Rose Hallgren

An addition and renovation of a weekend house on Torö, an island in Stockholm's southern archipelago. The existing building is a catalogue home from the early 1970s, standing in a mossy clearing on the highest point of the island.

A new volume extends the northern gable, every interior space was reprogrammed, and a new roof was built, 93 m² in all, including the 18 m² addition.

Awarded Ung Svensk Arkitektur 2023. The jury cited a loving approach to an often overlooked category of Swedish folkhem architecture that avoids nostalgia, understanding the qualities of what is already there and blending them with contemporary additions.

See the project at AT–HH

AT–HH: James Hamilton, Malin Heyman and Rose HallgrenContractor: Lynn Bygg ABPhotography: Isak Berglund Mattsson-Mårn and Malin Valušková Najib

A permanent stage for the park in Tibro, built on a municipal budget of 300,000 kronor. Ordinary timber framing is clad in fibre-cement sheets, hand-painted as faux marble by students at the town's craft academy, so the structure reads as a stack of oversized quarried blocks.

Because the marbling is painted rather than cut, the veining can be bolder and stranger than any stone would allow. It is the first of fifteen speculative proposals from the Tibro Train Tracks study to be built.

See the project at Anders Berensson Architects

Anders Berensson ArchitectsRose Hallgren, ArchitectPhoto: Linda Hutchins

Press: Archello, Arkitektur, Arkitektur (essay)

Alma Löv Museum of Unexpected Art.

A beginning, made on the meadow across the little stream. A place to call home, built around an interest in ornament. Can ornament add something to a home?

A hands-on process where the sketching happens in direct contact with the material and the surroundings, where exploring is the point and the point is not an ending.

C.O.U.A.: Matilda Franzén, Rose Hallgren, Andreas Pettersson and Carolina Weiglshown as “Ornamenterad spill” in A Place to Call Home

Press: Alma Löv Museum

A set of small interventions arguing that a city built on islands barely touches its own water. Swimming rafts are scattered into neighbourhoods with no bathing nearby, compact cold bathhouses with saunas and water stairs line the quays, and football pitches float at Liljeholmskajen, Söder Mälarstrand and Hornsbergs strand.

The connective move is to hang walking and cycling routes from the foundations and arches of bridges that already exist. Årstabroarna, Västerbron and Tranebergsbron all gain one, with a new opening bridge between Masthamnen and Saltsjökvarn.

See the project at Anders Berensson Architects

Anders Berensson ArchitectsRose Hallgren, Architect

Press: Designboom, SVT, Mitt i

Two mall showrooms for an independent electric-vehicle charging operator. The company sells a service rather than a shelf of products, so the shops are built as oversized shop windows, readable in a single glance from the walkway.

Four illuminated pylons stand in a quarter circle facing the mall, one for each kind of customer: private owners, housing co-operatives, offices and public bodies, each with a surface to touch and test. Lit panels are paired with ash; meeting space and back office sit behind.

See the project at Anders Berensson Architects

Anders Berensson ArchitectsRose Hallgren, Architectwith Marie Ekblad

Fluffy Encounters joins the 2025 Copenhagen Architecture Biennial with a combined workshop and exhibition dedicated to the possibilities of wool in architecture. The project explores how this ancient fibre, often discarded today, can support slow, circular, and locally rooted material practices.

Through hands-on making and curated displays of Nordic collaborations, visitors encounter wool at different stages: raw, processed, reworked, and reimagined through innovative products and value-chain efforts.

The workshop invites participants to sort, felt, shape, and engage directly with wool, while the exhibition contextualises these processes within broader cultural, ecological, and architectural conversations.

Together, they highlight how returning to materials and their rhythms can help mend fragmented resource flows and cultivate an architecture grounded in care, collaboration, and slowness.

Watch the film on YouTube

Fanfaluca Collectivewith Axfoundation, Dalarna Science Park and the Nordic Wool Initiative

Press: CAFx, Better Shelter

Drömmarens Malmö (Malmö Dreaming) is Fanfaluca Collective's contribution to the architecture festival Malmö in the Making. The project consists of two parts, a film that examines the stories of Malmöiter (people of Malmö) and their connection to their city.

The second complementary element is a built installation where you can take part in the film in the public space. The contribution aims to invite a dreaming about our relationship with the city by conveying different descriptions and perspectives of Malmö.

Within dreaming, everything is possible. Hopes, reflections and relationships float to the surface. Together, we want to create a moment of shared travel in thought, through the spaces of the city.

Watch the film on YouTube

Fanfaluca Collective

A two-day tufting workshop at Aavistus, an audiovisual festival in Helsinki, made together with Jonas Johansson. Ten participants tufted their own cultural canon using the exquisite corpse method: two groups of four each designed and tufted a square, then passed it on for the next group to respond to without ever seeing the whole.

The result is 24 tufted squares covering 140 × 210 cm. For the workshop I designed and built a custom modular tufting frame that expands to 2 × 4 metres and folds down into a sports bag.

See the project at Jonas Johansson

With Jonas Johansson

Stage design for Danny Saucedo's "Happy That You Found Me" at Melodifestivalen 2024, built around a physical Romanesque gate and staircase set against three eight-metre LED walls and a nine-metre LED floor.

The gate is the hinge of the whole piece. It is real, built to be projection-mapped, and the projected architecture continues out of it into the screens, so the boundary between what is standing there and what is light is never quite fixed. The visuals move from a moonlit Romanesque evening through a garden like Elysium to a climax where the gate falls back into open sky.

I worked on the scenography and built the physical maquette the team tested the visuals against, which is how the proportions of the gate and its staircase were settled before anything was fabricated at scale.

See the project at Jonas Johansson

Smash Studio, co-design, 3D modelling and animationRose Hallgren, scenographyJonas Johansson, Technical director

A vase made for a single flower. Tulips keep growing after they are cut, so the vessel has to hold something that rearranges itself over the days it stands there. The vase stays still while the flower moves.

The form is an interpretation of the Delft pyramid, the tiered tulip vase of the seventeenth century, when a single bulb could cost more than a house.

Winning entry in the Tulip competition, run by Blomsterfrämjandet with Klong and Straight Design Studio

I photograph buildings and the places between them, alongside the architectural work, often on site visits, and often of things that will not stay as they are.

The same eye does the documentation work: as in-house photographer at Codesign I shot the studio's finished interiors, among them the offices for NoA, The North Alliance, and the workshops and street actions of its research studio.

Interiors photographed for Codesign; the interiors themselves are Codesign's work