Ljus & Lund started in the autumn of 2019 when Maja Lindströmömöm left her buying job in Gothenburg and moved back to Stockholm with a list of products she had always wanted to stock but never could. The name comes from two things she kept coming back to: ljus, the Swedish word for both light and candle, and lund, a small grove of trees. She wanted the shop to feel like both. Warm and lit from within, rooted in something natural. The first order she ever shipped was a ceramic pendant lamp to a customer in Umeå, packed in a box she had reinforced with extra cardboard because she was nervous about the glass.
The range grew slowly. In 2021 she added the garden category after spending a pandemic spring on her balcony and realising that most garden shops online were either too large and impersonal or too focused on the serious allotment grower. She wanted something for the person with four pots and a south-facing window who still cares about what the trowel looks like. By 2023 the storage and planter categories had expanded enough that she moved fulfilment to a small warehouse in Bromma, though she still photographs new arrivals herself on weekends.
Maja Lindströmömöm grew up in Dalarna, where her grandmother kept a single ceramic lamp burning in the kitchen window through every winter. She studied interior architecture at Konstfack in Stockholm, then spent four years as a product buyer for a mid-size Gothenburg furniture chain before deciding the assortment she was curating for others was the assortment she actually wanted to sell herself. She launched Ljus & Lund in 2019 from a rented storage room in Sundbyberg, photographing products on a white sheet pinned to the wall. She still does most of the photography herself. Outside the shop she tends a small balcony garden and reads crime novels in the bath.