Inside design: Eva Lundgreen

Swedish textile and graphic designer Eva Lundgreen has created IKEA's children's collections for the past three years. This season, however, you'll find her bold, graphic style making its mark on the IKEA Holiday Collection. Here, she shares her insights into the look of Christmas 2008.

STYLE AT HOME Your designs have a fanciful element. Did your work, which includes kids' items, influence the products you created for the collection?
Eva Lundgreen Not directly, but certainly memories of the past did. I've
always been inspired by the countryside. My father is from a rural area near the mountains in Sweden. To me, Christmas is all about being there -- in the snow, with a fire burning in the fireplace to warm you when you come in from skiing. I particularly love the wool blankets that are used in the sleds behind the horses; the colours and textures really inspired me. Old-fashioned Swedish style evokes such positive memories for me. My challenge was to give it a modern twist.

S@H How does old-fashioned become new again?
EL Swedish Christmas is not about glamour -- it's about simplicity, a key
ingredient in modern interiors. So, to start, I took some of the images used in old Swedish Christmas stories, simplified them, then enlarged them so they're more graphic. A red heart is a very typical image and a nice symbol, too. The repetition of bold, graphic images is modern; so is adding unusual colours to the classic red-and-green theme. In this collection, I picked orange, an exciting, contemporary colour that's warm for winter. You'll see orange in my striped textiles. Stripes were very popular in Scandinavian fabrics made a hundred years ago, but there's also something really modern about the look of striped pillows.