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Stockholm International School celebrates its 60th anniversary

Stockholm International School has seen thousands of students pass through its doors since it was founded in 1951. To mark its fiftieth birthday, Maggie Dankiewicz, Valerie Evers, Caroline Engström-Roberts and the students of Grade 5 tell of its fascinating history.

Published: 22 November 2011 16:33 CET
Stockholm International School celebrates its 60th anniversary

For quite a few years the fifth grade at Stockholm International School (SIS) has held an International Lunch with entertainment provided by the students. This year as SIS is celebrating its 60th year it was decided to have a dinner instead to celebrate this milestone. The entertainment was a nostalgic trip from the fifties through the decades, recalling songs, world events and some school history.

Stockholm International School, or the English School as it was known then, was founded in 1951, by Mrs. Gisela Dietze. The first school was located at Djurgården and by the year’s end it had 58 students, representing fifteen nations. When Mrs. Dietze took the little ones out for a walk, they all held on to a rope so that they could keep together. An article referring to the rope appeared in a Stockholm newspaper. It described ‘A rope of friendship with knots in it is all that is needed to unite the nations to mutual strength and security.’

SIS has grown quite a bit since then. At present there are 540 students from all over the world! In Grade 5 there are 52 students from 24 different countries and 6 of the 7 continents speaking many different languages.

It is like a mini United Nations and even though the students have very different backgrounds, they play, work and learn together each day.

In 1956 Queen Elizabeth II made a state visit to Sweden and five pupils from the school presented her with a bouquet of flowers.

It was in the 50s that colour televisions became available in the US. And in 1955 Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was rocking the world. It was in this decade that DNA, the secret of life was discovered by James Watson and Frances Crick, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 and Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest.

In Stockholm, Sweden the school was growing steadily. In 1964 the name of the School had changed to the “Anglo-American School of Stockholm” In 1967 it moved to its present location in the center of the city, Johannesgatan 18. The student population then was 288. Like today the students at SIS in those early years had lots of enjoyable activities. There were annual concerts and plays, some of which were performed in French, German, and Latin.

1961 saw the beginning of the construction of the Berlin wall and in 1962 the first computer video game, Spacewar, was invented. The Beatles are probably the most famous rock band ever and were active throughout the 60’s. The mop top hair-style of John, Paul, George and Ringo was seen among boys at the school in the 60’s. The students of the 60s went to the cinema to see films such as Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music or The Jungle Book.

This was the ‘Space Age’ and on July 20th, 1969 Apollo 11, landed on the moon. It was a great honor and an exciting event when John Glenn, a member of NASA’s original astronaut group, visited our school. He was the fifth person in space and was the first American to orbit the Earth, aboard Friendship 7 on February 20th, 1962. If you look carefully when you visit the school and you may see a picture of John Glenn during his visit.

1971 was the year of the first e-mail transmission and Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola demonstrated the first hand- held mobile phone in 1973. Microwave ovens became commercially available in the 70s and pocket calculators were introduced. Soccer has always been a popular sport in the playground at the school so it must have been very exciting for the students that the 1970 Fifa World Cup became the first world cup to be televised in color. Brazil played against Italy in the final and won 4-1.

A famous Swedish sportsman from this time is Björn Borg who won five Wimbledon singles titles between 1974 and 1981. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Another great Swedish sportsman from this period is the famous skier Ingemar Stenmark. He won more international events than any other alpine skier in history. 1970 saw the formation of a Swedish pop group, Abba, that was destined to become famous all over the world,. In 1974 Abba won the Eurovision concert with the song “Waterloo”. There is a picture in the school of the Abba members with the school choir. The choir performed on the original recording of ‘I have a Dream’ which was featured on Abba’s 1979 Voulez Vous album.

In the 80’s fashions change yet again. Big hair becomes popular and shoulder pads, jean jackets and leather pants are regarded as trendy. The school is now “The International School of Stockholm” with blue as its color. Popular films of the decade include : E.T. , Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Crocodile Dundee and FAME. Video games continued to grow in popularity.

The ’90s decade is often considered the true dawn of the Information Age. More people own computers and mobile phones gain massive popularity worldwide. Sony’s PlayStation becomes the top selling game console. Cabbage Patch dolls and Star War toys are popular. June 30th, 1997, saw the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone which has since been translated into at least 67 different languages.

The new millennium started 2000 and this is the year that the students in the current fifth grade were born.The school is now Stockholm International School. The school has the International Primary Curriculum, and the IB Programmes – Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the Diploma Programme (DP). There is an Annex on Luntmakargatan to accommodate increasing numbers of students. During our United Nations Day Assemblies, there are visits by Nelson Mandela’s grandson and Hans Blix.

E-mail, Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are part of everyday life, and it is now 60 years since the school was founded. Mrs Gisela Dietze would be very proud to see that though the school has grown and changed in many ways, it remains the friendly, warm and welcoming place that continues to serve the international community in the Stockholm region.

Article sponsored by Stockholm International School.

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LIVING IN SWEDEN

What you need to know about owning a second home in Sweden

In most countries owning a second home is a luxury reserved for the wealthy, but in Sweden it's very common to have a summer home or 'fritidshus'. Here's what you need to know.

Published: 8 February 2024 15:25 CET
What you need to know about owning a second home in Sweden

What is a fritidshus? 

In Sweden, second homes are generally either classified as a fritidshus, literally a “free time house”, or a permanenthus or permanentboende.

A fritidshus is defined as “a house which is not set up for all-year-around living”. Rather confusingly, this does not mean that you can’t live all-year-round in a fritidshus, or, indeed, that you can’t use a permanenthus as your summer house. 

The difference comes down to how the two types of property are treated in Sweden’s building code, with fritidshus allowed, among other things, to have lower ceilings, smaller bathrooms, more basic kitchens, worse accessibility for disabled people, a lower standard of insulation. 

If you decide to live permanently in a fritidshus, you do not need to get approval to do so, but the building committee at your local council can, if they learn of what you are doing, demand that the building be changed to meet the requirements of a permanenthus (although this rarely happens).

There is also a subgroup of fritidshus, kolonilott, which are houses with a small amount of land which should be used for growing food (although lots of people just use them as attractive gardens). This is different from an odlingslott, which is just an allotment, essentially a kolonilott without the house.

These are usually in designated kolonilott areas close to or in cities, and are not intended for year-round living. In most kolonilott areas, water supply and drainage is cut off outside of the growing season, and you’re not allowed to register them as your permanent address, for example.

Relaxing outside a summer house. Photo: Doris Beling/Imagebank Sweden

How much does a second home cost? 

The average price of a fritidshus fell by about 6 percent in 2023, following a 1 percent fall in 2022, and now lies at about 2.2 million kronor.

But a search on the Hemnet website for fritidshus under 1 million kronor shows that many sell for a lot less, particularly outside the most popular areas. 

As a rule of thumb, anything within an hour’s drive of Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö is likely to be more expensive, as is anywhere on the coast (particularly on Gotland), next to a lake, or near one of Sweden’s more popular skiing areas. 

A report from Länsförsäkringar Fastighetsförmedling, out in mid-2023, found that summer houses were cheapest in Kronoberg country (the southern bit of Småland), followed by Örebro, Värmland, Norrbotten and Västernorrland, and most expensive in Gotland, Stockholm County and Halland. 

What’s the point of having one? 

Despite its vast expanses of unspoiled nature, Sweden is very urbanised, with nearly 90 percent of people living in built-up areas and 63 percent in the biggest few cities. It’s much more common to live in an apartment in a city than in the sort of suburban sprawl of houses with their own gardens so common in countries like the UK and US.

This means that most urban Swedes leave any gardening to their summer houses or allotments.

Given the cold, dark winters, that probably makes sense. 

Fritidshus and other second homes are also at the centre of the long Swedish summer break, when people often take three, or even four, weeks off back-to-back. If you don’t have your own fritidshus, you can spend much of the summer visiting people who do. 

What’s the downside? 

Aside from the cost, it’s a lot of work. Owning a fritidshus means weekends spent at out-of-town building supply shops, and brings a whole new list of chores like cleaning the gutters, mowing, trimming hedges, raking leaves and chopping wood.

If you like foreign travel, and have a lot of other passions and hobbies, you may find owning a summer house squeezes them out. 

A summer house in the Stockholm archipelago. Photo: Sara de Basly/Imagebank Sweden

How common is it to have a fritidshus? 

There are about 607,000 fritidshus in Sweden, and according to Statistics Sweden, about one in three children (35 percent) have access to one.

It most common to have access to a fritidshus in the north of Sweden, with more than half of children having access to one in 51 municipalities north of Dalarna, and it is least common in Skåne, where in some municipalities only 10 percent of children have access to a fritidshus. 

Is it best to have a second home in a fritidsområde or on its own? 

Many municipalities in Sweden have set aside areas, often near a lake or by the sea, specifically for the building of fritidshus, selling off plots, or tomter, on which people can either build a holiday cottage themselves or get a builder to do it.

According to Statitsics Sweden, about a quarter of fritidshus are in such an area, with Stockholm County boasting the most fritidsområde, or holiday home areas, followed by Västra Götaland (near Gothenburg) and Skåne (near Malmö and Helsingborg). 

If you are building your own summer house, the advantage of doing so in a fritidsområde is that electricity, water and sewage has normally already been run along the edge of the plot, making these services cheap and easy to connect. 

If you want to get a summer house near the coast or a lake, it is also cheaper if you buy one in a fritidsområde. 

On the downside, they can feel a little like living in a housing estate, you have to be careful not to make too much noise, and can end up getting complaints from the local neighbourhood committee if you don’t maintain your property in the way they expect. 

As many fritidsområde were set up the 1960s and 1970s, with a lot of the houses then built by enthusiastic amateurs, they can also be in desrepair and have structural problems. 

The plots that have yet to be built on, meanwhile, are often the worst, for instance with ground that is damp or prone to flooding. 

Renting out your second home

One of the advantages of your second home being classed as a fritidshus is that – so long as you’re only renting it out short-term — you are not covered by Sweden’s strict rental law or hyreslagen.

This means whatever rent you agree with the tenant is valid, there is no requirement to ask for a “reasonable” rent, and tenants cannot contest the rent with the regional rent tribunal.  

Airbnb makes renting out your fritidshus extremely easy and on the other side makes it a lot cheaper and easier to rent a summer house for three weeks in the summer than to own one all year around.  

If you earn more than 40,000 kronor in a year from renting out your fritidshus, though, you are required to declare it to the Swedish Tax Agency. 

You can then subtract a 40,000 kronor ‘standard deduction’ from your rental revenue and a further 20 percent deduction for rental income, before it gets taxed. See the guide from the Swedish Tax Agency here. 

This means if you receive 60,000 kronor in rent, you subtract first 40,000 kronor, then 20 percent of the 60,000 kronor, which comes to 12,000 kronor.

This leaves you with 8,000 kronor to be taxed as capital income at 30 percent, leaving just 2,400 kronor in tax due. 

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