Rose Hallgren outdoors at golden hour, eyes closed, with her dog Sigge against a cloudy sky

Studio Rose Hallgren

I am an architect and designer in Stockholm. I work between drawing and making: a house in the archipelago, a marbled outdoor stage, a tufted wall, a glazed vessel.

What interests me is the point where a plan has to become a material decision. Weaving and ceramics are not finishes applied at the end. They are how I work out what a space should be.

Much of my current work runs through wool and wood. I showed wool as a building material at the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial, with Axfoundation and the Nordic Wool Initiative. The wood runs from prefabricated houses drawn for the factory to the Torö addition, which was awarded Ung Svensk Arkitektur 2023.

I trained at KTH and took housing from city-scale proposals to full construction drawings at Anders Berensson Architects. I model in Rhino and Blender, and I photograph and scan the buildings I work with.

Together with Jenny Hedén Malm I run Fanfaluca Collective. I am one of four behind C.O.U.A., and I also work with the lighting collective Svartljus and Kulturföreningen PLX. My studio is at Åsögatan 122 in Stockholm, shared with SMASH and collaborator Jonas Johansson.

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Torö

2021–2023 · Torö, Nynäshamn

Exterior at the highest point of the island

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

c/o

2023 · Sweden

Two additions to Sommarnöjen's c/o series of prefabricated summer houses. Buyers usually own remote plots, so c/o 40 arrives as two volumes sized to Swedish road transport limits and is craned together on site, one holding kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms, the other the living room. c/o 50 repeats the arrangement with an extra bedroom.

The work also meant auditing every detail and drawing across the existing range, visiting the Latvian and Estonian factories that build the houses, and partly automating the drawing production so each house generates its own document set.

See the project at Anders Berensson Architects

Anders Berensson ArchitectsRose Hallgren, Architectin collaboration with Sommarnöjen

Rock Stage

2022 · Tibro

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)

Rock Stage from the side, showing the depth of the roof

Corner detail where two painted blocks meet

Interior of the stage under the painted roof

Close-up of the hand-painted red faux marble

The build team on site during construction

Students painting the roof sheets as faux marble

Järva Stadspark

2022 · Stockholm

The park seen from the terraces, looking up towards the new district

A proposal to turn Järvafältet, the under-used green wedge between Stockholm's north-western suburbs, into a genuine city park by wrapping a new timber district around its edge. Around 12,000 homes and 140,000 m² of workspace step up from allotment-hut scale to towers along an extended Rinkebystråket with a new tram line.

The stepped roofs are treated as public ground, so the park climbs over the buildings and returns to the landscape on footbridges. A raised Granholmstoppen adds ski slopes, and a widened stream becomes a swimming lake.

See the project at Anders Berensson Architects

Anders Berensson ArchitectsRose Hallgren, Architect

Press: Designboom, Dagens Nyheter, Fastighetsvärlden

The district seen from the ski slope at Granholmstoppen

Aerial view of the new city edge and the park

C.O.U.A.

2024 · Alma Löv Museum of Unexpected Art, Värmland

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

Folkbastu

2024 · Dalénum–Kappsta, Lidingö

Drawing on Finnish sauna culture and a love of form, craft and durability, a sauna jetty proposed for the shoreline around Dalénum and Larsberg. A place for the people of Lidingö to unwind and take part in what bathing does for you.

There is something magical about a sauna, a place that gives you room to breathe away from the obligations of the day. In a society where we are more often absent than present, somewhere to relax and be in the moment is worth building.

With Jonas Johanssonsubmitted to Lidingö stad's open call for bathing and sauna jetties

Press: Mitt i Lidingö

Stockholm Shorelines

2022 · Stockholm

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

Walkway hung under the arches of Västerbron

Floating football field at Liljeholmskajen

Marieberg

2022 · Stockholm

A densification study for Marieberg on Kungsholmen, tied to a proposed metro line between Fridhemsplan and Liljeholmen. The district's height ceiling comes from Bromma airport's flight paths; with Bromma due to close, the proposal removes that constraint and sets new towers alongside Marieberg's existing landmarks.

Around 90,000 m² of floor area, roughly half of it some 4,500 flats over ground-floor shops and restaurants. Rålambsvägen gives up half its width to a linear park.

See the project at Anders Berensson Architects

Anders Berensson ArchitectsRose Hallgren, Architect

Press: SVT, Mitt i

Eways

2021 · Täby Centrum and Mall of Scandinavia

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

2025 · Copenhagen Architecture Biennial

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

A finished felted piece passed between hands

The exhibition talk in the workshop space

Drömmarens Malmö

2023 · Malmö in the Making, Malmö

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

Drip Drop Non Stop

2023 · PLX Tjärö, Blekinge

Like the transparent willow leaves that make up the eel in its first stage of life, the viewers, brought together by the currents of life, become aware of their senses. The play between the most basic elements of our surroundings: light, water and sound is embodied by a recurring event, the dripping of water.

A meditative state and a stillness, softly entwined under a water surface. The drops are caught by a vessel which in turn emits a sound. A music of "drip drop" and resonance from the walls of the vessel is staged.

Fanfaluca Collective

Tufting Ex Machina

2024 · Aavistus Festival, Helsinki

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

Participants tufting during the workshop

The modular frame Rose designed and built

The finished piece exhibited at the festival

Jag är Gud

2024 · Kilen, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, Stockholm

Danne Dahlin alone on the stage at Kilen

An autobiographical one-man show by the dancer Danne Dahlin about living with bipolar disorder. I designed the scenography and, with Jonas Johansson, the video; the lighting was kept deliberately plain so the room stays with Danne, who carries the whole piece alone.

Dahlin was headed for a career in dance when the illness took hold. The piece looks back across nineteen years: a first manic episode in New York, the stable years that could no longer hold it back, and being found in Los Angeles in 2018 surrounded by police with drawn weapons.

It premiered at Kilen, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, in November 2024, sold out, and was staged a second time.

See the project at Jonas Johansson

Scenography: Rose HallgrenLight and video: Jonas JohanssonPerformer: Danne DahlinActor and director: Jakob Bladh

Press: Svenska Dagbladet

Danny Saucedo

2024 · Melodifestivalen, Stockholm

The darkened stage, a lone figure in silhouette at the top of a staircase inside a tall arch of deep red light, reflected in the floor

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

Danny Saucedo singing in front of the gate, its arch overgrown with projected ivy and purple flowers in warm gold light

Danny Saucedo mid-performance, arms wide, against concentric pink and violet neon arches on the LED walls

Resonance

2024 · Allt Ljus på Uppsala, Stora torget

Uppsala Town Hall at night, its whole facade washed in pink and blue projection, people standing on lit pads in the square below

An interactive projection onto the facade of Uppsala Town Hall for Allt Ljus på Uppsala, where the public painted the building in colour by standing on four pads in the square.

I built the pads. Each one is weatherproofed with lighting embedded in its edge, made to survive a Swedish winter outdoors and a great many people jumping on it, and each triggers a ripple of colour across the facade. Activate all four at once and a final sequence of light and music plays out.

The building was drone-scanned to make a digital replica, and a laser-cut scale model stood in for it while the projection was tested.

See the project at Allt Ljus på Uppsala

See the project at Jonas Johansson

With Smash Studio and Jonas JohanssonRose Hallgren, touch pads

The four touch pads seen from above, glowing green, blue, amber and teal on the wet cobbles with people gathered around them

Close-up of a pair of boots standing on one pad, its edge lit white and amber

The facade from across the square in warmer colours, the row of four pads leading towards it

A visitor in a blue jacket watching the projection, two lit pads in front of her

Tulip

2021 · Blomsterfrämjandet, Klong and Straight Design Studio

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

3, 2, 1, Barneval!

2018–2020 · Stockholm

The Barnevalen carnival parade on its way to Mynttorget

A countdown campaign by Codesign Research Studio to 20 January 2020, the day the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child became Swedish law. Not an exhibition but a year of street actions, school workshops and guerrilla activism, gathering work on children's spatial rights into one public campaign.

It opened on 20 January 2019 with an action on Drottninggatan where the architects wore capes built from their own printed material. Mine was assembled from information cards carrying the articles of the Convention, so the costume was also the handout, and incidentally avoided the permit a stationary stand would have needed.

Alongside it ran the Palla ta plats stool workshop for Kulturnatten, and an action at Almedalen where bicycles carried the line that a fifth of Sweden's population is under eighteen and none of them are consulted about the city.

Codesign Research Studio, cohort 2018/19Rose Hallgren, Architectwith Jelena Mijanović, Hanna Ivansson and Daniella RicciPhotographs and the Palla ta plats illustration by Rose Hallgren

Press: Arkitekten, Arkitekten (debate), ARQ

Children and architects parading down Drottninggatan

Bicycles at Almedalen carrying the campaign message, with the pink wire figures

The research group at Almedalen: Hanna Ivansson, Jelena Mijanović and Daniella Ricci Saccotelli

Children handling one of the pink wire figures on a Visby square

Palla ta plats!, illustration for the Kulturnatten stool workshop

Pupils at Europaskolan building a stool during the workshop

Photography

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