Naturally Nordic

By Shari Mycek

updated 1:07 p.m. ET March 5, 2007

Stockholm is beautiful. On a midsummer morning in July, I stare out the glassed breakfast nook of the Grand Hôtel stirring crimson-red lingonberries into creamy muesli and watching mist swirl across fairy-tale buildings. I am surrounded by tall, flaxen-haired, model-esque women and men — who sip coffee and butter toast for their blond, cherub-cheeked children.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” I hear. Somehow, in my musings, I’d missed seeing her come in, the fairest of them all — Swedish skincare icon Kerstin Florian, whose international spa company bears the same name, in residence for the summer. We’d met months before in Phoenix, far from Stockholm’s archipelago seascape, where Florian was rolling out new therapies at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort’s Revive Spa. After receiving a treatment that cocooned me in lavender and sea salt, I sat with her for hours under an umbrella (the desert sun at our backs) talking about what “spa” means and where she finds her inspiration. Every insight — from the famous muds, seaweeds, and salts used in her product line to her steadfast belief that “spa is not a treatment, but a lifestyle” — always circled back to one place. Sweden.

Born and raised in Stockholm, Florian spent summers at her family’s cottage in the Baltic Sea archipelago of Värmdö, where she embraced “the solitude and magic” of the lapping sea and towering birch trees, sacred to Sweden’s native Sami people, who populate the arctic circle region.

“The Sami are very spiritual,” Florian told me. “They anoint their newborn babies with birch-bud oil to cleanse their spirits, and before making an important life decision, stand under a birch tree holding a brass ring to their eye to focus on what they need to see.”

At age 21, Florian (then a print-and-runway model) moved to California, where she got married, raised a family, and launched her now-international skincare company. But each May since, she’s returned to Sweden to spend the summer reconnecting with her roots. “Sweden is where I refill my energy; where I feel most alive,” she told me. “Every year when I arrive, the blossoms are just bursting with color and life, and I say, ‘Are you blossoming, Kerstin? And if the answer is no, then I go into nature, pick mushrooms and berries in the forest, sit under a birch tree and meditate, and swim daily in the sea. In that comes renewal, and that, to me, is spa.” Now, months later, Florian has invited me to experience, firsthand, her au naturel spa.

Our plan for this sunny, almost-80-degree day is to go boating through the archipelagoes — an adored warm-weather pastime in Sweden and Florian’s “absolute favorite thing to do” (aside from spending time with her grandchildren). Dressed for the part, her platinum hair is pulled into a girlish ponytail, dark sunglasses perch upon her head, and she’s in “sailor whites” — cropped pants, canvas shoes, and a V-necked white sweater trimmed in navy. “We had our own boat for years,” she says, zipping in her blue Volvo to Saltsjöbaden, an ancient fishing village. “I miss it, but no worries. In Sweden, when you don’t have a boat, your friend or friend’s friend will take you out. Swedes are boating people. It’s what we do.”

Sturebadet Carved colonnades and colorful tiles adorn Sturebadet’s swimming pool, an eclectic architectural icon in Stockholm since 1902.

After a 15-minute drive from Stockholm, we arrive at a 52-foot yacht captained by a svelte and deeply tanned 59-year-old Swede named Staffan. “Welcome,” he says as he kisses us on both cheeks. He then turns to me: “And congratulations. You are off to see the most beautiful archipelago in the world, a true slice of heaven.”

After dousing our faces and bodies with sunscreen and slathering moor mud on our feet to bake along the way, we’re off, and within seconds I’m hooked. Purring slowly through narrow channels, we pass white birch trees and traditional wooden houses — ocher-red with black doors and white-trimmed windows — each with a tiny detached sauna house. Mahogany boats with blue-and-yellow Swedish flags billow past — their passengers waving in greeting. In time, the channel widens, houses disappear, and we are in a whirl of blue sea dotted with giant boulders and white swans bobbing gracefully in pairs.

“Since I was a little girl, it has always been this way,” Florian says. “You pull your boat into your favorite place, spread a picnic, swim naked if you like, sunbathe, spend the day. It’s so fresh, so pure — just you, the water, sun, sky, and rocks.”

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We troll on, stopping at one point to collect seaweed, which Florian boils in a pot in the galley. Banishing Staffan from view, we smear the green-brown mixture on our bodies and bask in the sun. When our seaweed body masque is hardened, we dive into the cool sea. By the time we reach the last Swedish island before the open Baltic Sea, I’m famished. I see a small sign outside a worn clapboard restaurant that reads “Sandhamn Värdshus, 1672; open every day since.”

“To come way out here, dock the boat, bathe, and then eat the most fabulous meal — fried bass with lingonberries and mashed potatoes accompanied by a nice glass of wine — this, too, is spa,” Florian says, smiling. Hours later on our way back to Stockholm, Staffan anchors the boat once more, and again we dive in. The cold seawater on warm flesh is magical. Hypnotic, even. There are no crowds or noise, nor any reason to rush. The midnight sun means the sky will stay light for hours more, so there’s plenty of time to bob blissfully with the swans — and just be.

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“Swedes don’t have as many material things as Americans do, but they are in tune with the simple luxuries and know how to rejuvenate and bring back their shen (energy),” says Florian. “Spa doesn’t have to be so formulated.” Like much of Europe, Scandi-navia’s spa tradition dates back to drinking mineral waters, bathing (for Swedes, in pine and chamomile), and sitting in a sauna. But the modern-day spa scene is relatively new, and Florian is helping to define it. She opened her first Scandinavian spa in 1989 and today has over 100 spas in Sweden; eight in Norway; and six in Denmark (in addition to more than 100 in the U.S.). But although her spirit and energy are evident in all, no two spas are the same; each reflects its own natural landscape.

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