The aim of this paper is to study how storytelling is used by Swedish country houses as a marketing strategy, to communicate the values and meaning of heritage, with the specific example of Tjolöholm Castle outside of Kungsbacka, Sweden.

Our guiding questions revolve around the multiplicity of narrative modes that are actually or potentially present in such communication: What stories are told and what stories could be told? Also, how have stories been told and how can they be told, with regards to developments in technology and media? With this, we intend to show how different cultural and historical values are integrated into the estate, as a building and its environs, and communicated by various means, particularly with commercial interests in mind. The estate itself constitutes a mix of old and new, represented by the ambivalent emphasis on a retro-Tudor style contrasted with a focus on highly modern conveniences and technologies, as well as a blend of the foreign and the domestic, represented by the Britishness of the arts and crafts interior and the exterior gardens and landscape, bordering a typical Swedish seascape.

The analysis will focus on two levels of storytelling: one a manifest level of commercial communication in guided tours and on the website in the present day, the other a hidden layer of the original intentions revealed by the historical records, such as the collection of letters from Blanche Dickson to the architect at the time of construction in the early 20th century. Stories can be made materially manifest through the architecture, the décor and the landscaping design, forming a remaining trace of the original conception of the country house, or they can be mediated through present day interpretations and appropriations in popular culture.

A particular case in point is Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), which used the castle as its principal filming location and as a backdrop to its apocalyptic plot, and how the film was then employed as a marketing device on the castle’s website in collaboration with Gothenburg Film Festival; in this way, a new, external narrative is being added to the already multilayered story of Tjolöholm Castle. The built environment, its existing and its emergent narratives might then be seen as a historical palimpsest, where the past, present and future overlap in a continuing, maybe never-ending construction of stories.