Oscar Kylberg and his partner, Prince Carl Philip Bernadotte – formally also the Duke of Värmland, and the son of Sweden’s reigning monarch, King Carl XVI Gustaf – have made a splash in the greenhouse for European commercial design right outside the gate, since they founded their design agency in Stockholm , Bernadotte + Kylberg, 2012.

The gentlemen are close. Both went to Forsbergs, the foremost Swedish design school, and are the kind of bubbling smart varieties who do not think any idea is worth its salt until they shred it into pieces to see if it can withstand the pain.

“Every day,” Kylberg has been quoted as saying, “is the day of the boar.”

When I confronted him with the quote, he said, with a kind of confused Einstein air, “Well, that sounds like something I should say.”

They claim that they learned all that fragmentation at Forsbergs, but it is easy to see that they had it in them before they came to school. At this point, Bernadotte is the godfather of one of Kylberg’s children, and the gentlemen have sprung up with new patterns in almost every possible area, so that they tend to end each other’s thoughts in a well-mannered, witty way. When you chat with them both at once, as this reporter did, it’s like playing hacky-sack with a pair of Premier League footballers as they spin and jump around while holding one of those little beanbags in the air. indefinite time.

Berdadotte and Kylberg have just designed, built and personally tested a suite in Sweden’s famous Icehotel, the hotel and resort by the Torne River in the charming Arctic village of Jukkasjärvi, about one hundred and twenty-five miles by bird’s eye view north of the Arctic Circle. Every March, the hotel harvests ice from Torne in two-ton blocks. Many long tones of it. This is what they stock during the nominal Arctic summer at the same time as they invite artists and designers from all over the world to go up to Jukkasjärvi and build hotels every year.

For those who are weak in heart who do not sleep in minus 5 Celsius (23 Fahrenheit) even on a delicious pile of reindeer skins, there is what they call a “warm” hotel on the property. In April, the rooms made of ice melt slowly as the ice is harvested from the clear Torne for next year’s collection of suites. The Icehotel people are excellent at this. They have been harvesting ice, building the hotel and letting it melt for the past thirty-two years.

“So, when they called us to invite us to make a suite,” says Prince Carl Philip, “we were very happy, but then we kind of looked at each other and said, ‘What are we going to do?'”

“We actually said what the hell we’re going to do,” Kylberg says. “Then we thought, how the hell are we going to do that?”

Bernadotte says, “Then we thought, yes, we must have something really Swedish, I mean, like what the Swedes value most, and we have to put that in the suite. And the only thing that Swedes love, almost more than anything else, is midsummer, when everything is in bloom. It’s so short here, the season. ”

“That’s how we came up with the idea of ​​literally putting the flowers in ice blocks, much like frames, but not, and making the room out of them,” says Kylberg.

“They’ve been doing this for thirty years,” says Prince Carl Philip, “and no one had ever thought of putting flowers in the ice. We knew we had to be able to see through the ice to the flowers, so we wanted the ice with the least bubbles. The founder of Icehotel knows Torne so well that he actually showed us the place in the river where the current moves but smooth enough so that the ice does not have so many. ”

The process of getting the flowers into the ice is complex, as seen above. First, the bottom of the box frame is prepared, then the flowers are sprayed with water, which immediately freezes, and the top is then mounted in and which is also sealed with water that freezes.

“It’s a midsummer night’s dream,” says Prince Carl Philip, adding, “I actually booked it for myself and my family for Christmas. I was just thinking, I want us to wake up here on Christmas morning and have all these flowers around us. ”

I ask the designers when the flowers, which are all cut, will need to be replaced.

“We do not know,” says Kylberg and laughs. “Four months? Five? No one has ever done this before.”

“I think it’s the fact that they are sprayed that keeps them bright,” says Prince Carl Philip. “I mean, we put them in in November, so they’ve been there for two good months now and they’re fine.”