Best wishes from Oslo

For art director Mikal Strøm growing up didn’t turn out exactly as expected. At 31, he’s happy to have settled in Oslo, a city without flying cars, but a blooming coffee scene. “Over the last 5 years, small niche coffee shops and roasteries have been popping up in Oslo’s short streets and hidden alleyways, roasting and brewing the world’s finest coffee.” Read the story…

“We hope to be a contrast to franchises and assembly line mentality”, say Anne & Tonje, co-owners of the combined café and retro store Retrolykke. The two have successfully managed to bring a unique ambience to Oslo’s Grunerløkka area.

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Owner of the fabulous clothing and interior store Mitt Lille Hjem, Julie Ann Seglem, says she fell in love with Oslo right away, but it wasn’t until she moved to Grunerløkka she felt like home. “What I truly love, coming from a smaller city on the south coast, is the feeling of a local neighborhood surrounding me, where people take the time to stop, chat and mingle.”

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Only after being back in Oslo, fashion designer & illustrator Maja Stabel finds inspiration from surrounding herself with the creative community. “I think I needed to get away and nurture my adventurous side to realize what a great city this is.” Read the story…

You can only imagine the nightmare food blogger and -caterer Julie Chiku must have felt when finding out she was allergic to everything she was basing her living on. “I was in a state of shock, and had to take some time off from cooking, while taking strong medications and finding out, on a day-to day-basis, what I could actually eat”, she says. Luckily, she used the bad luck to her advantage, embracing allergy-friendly foods as a way of strengthening her business.

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The girls behind Minsk got their name on a trip to Moscow, but the heart of their design-bureau lays in Oslo. Still, they continue to travel, like going to Taiwan to become bicycle designers. When in Oslo you’ll find them at Mucho Mas where they all used to work “serving beers and quesadillas, while dreaming big about our future.” Read the story…

Illustrator and animator Nina Nordal Rønne tells the story of old Oslo, and how “a walk between old tree trunks, and then entering an open landscape, is refreshing” in a way that inspires her daily creative work. “When I draw or write, I work with a small-scale world under my hands. When I go for a walk and stop in front of a view, the perspective changes.” Read the story…

Way back when “the coffee shop concept was very new and unexplored”, some of Tim Wendelboe’s customers knew more about coffee than he did. Fast forward 16 years and he’s one of the main reasons why “Oslo … is one of the best cities in the world if you want to get a great cup of coffee”.
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Ola Refsnes, co-owner of much beloved Liebling, tells that Oslo-dwellers have missed his café without even realising it. And although he knew it would take some time until customers would embrace the communal table, they now seem to accept that “Liebling is a part of the European continent, and that Norwegian laws on ‘personal space’ don’t apply anymore”. Read the story…

Although a New Yorker at heart, Mark Steiner is now proud to call Oslo home. But why would “”someone possibly choose to abandon the city that never sleeps for Norway’s capital, a tranquil fishing village by comparison?”.  Read the story…

“Oslo is wonderfully traditional, at the same time the food scene is trailblazing for the world to follow”, says food & lifestyle photographer Marte Marie Forsberg about the city that once captured her teenage heart, and still inspires her work to this day. Read the story…

Instead of complaining that “yoga is still a hushed word in Oslo,” Tonje and Kelsi decided to do something about it. After initially meeting on Twitter, they soon came up with a plan to open their own studio and café in the middle of Grünerløkka. Read the story…

“How can you miss the light without the dark?” As a photographer & graphic designer, Rebecca Hawkes is always looking for the perfect light and found it in the changing seasons of the Norwegian capital. Read the story…