About the studio
And the creative
Hanna Stína has been drawing interiors in Reykjavík for over twenty years. Houses, restaurants, offices, and full renovations of buildings that were already being lived in. The studio runs under her own name, so whoever walks the site on the first visit is the same person who draws the plans.
Each project is shaped around the people who will use the space and around what the building is already doing well. What comes out of it is meant to feel considered and natural to its surroundings rather than styled, and to still be working years after the handover.
Behind every project there are three paramount standards that define the level of quality, consideration, and care carried throughout the entire design process
Design Integrity
A drawing is only worth something if the room gets built the way it was drawn. The proportion argued over in month two, the oak chosen because it takes knocks well: both have to survive detailing and still be on site when the joiner turns up. That is usually where a design gets thinned out. The programme tightens, someone needs a saving, and the details go first. So fixtures and finishes are picked for how they behave after five years of ordinary use, and drawn far enough that nobody has to ring and ask what was meant.
Sense of place
Iceland decides a good deal before anyone opens a sketchbook. Which way the building faces. How short the light is in January, and what the weather does against the glass. Whether there is a view worth taking a wall down for. All of it shapes a layout at least as much as the brief does. Materials get read the same way. Stone, timber and wool belong to where the building stands, so the interior is built to sit inside that instead of arguing with it.
Wellbeing
A room is working when you stop noticing it. A route through it that does not fight you. Storage sitting where the thing it holds actually gets used. Light that is still worth something at four in the afternoon. None of that photographs well and all of it matters more than any single gesture. So the first conversation is about how you want to live in the rooms: where you cook, where you read, which corner people always end up standing in. The interior gets built to carry that day rather than to perform through it.
The studio’s work has been recognised by Icelandic architecture and design awards, and covered regularly in the national press — single rooms, full renovations, restaurants and complete houses.
Selected coverage is listed below. Every press feature, with the images that ran alongside it, sits on the press page.
