Kvastekulla kapell

The cemetery was planned from 1952, with its landscape designed by the Finnish architects Bengt Lundsten and Per-Mauritz Ålander, winners of a Nordic architectural competition. Their scheme aimed to preserve the beauty of the natural landscape while making as few interventions as possible. The grounds were inaugurated in 1959, with the chapel following four years later, and today form a park-like setting that includes a memorial grove, an ash grave grove, a coffin grave grove, cultivated land, ponds and streams. Existing trees, including three tall deciduous specimens by the entrance, were retained and incorporated into the design.

The chapel itself is built into a slope, with a basement level that is not perceptible from inside the chapel hall. Its walls are of untreated concrete, rising to a tower-like lantern over the chancel, and the roofs are clad in copper. Inside, horizontal bands of varying width run across the walls, with a narrow band of windows between wall and ceiling admitting light, while angled pine pews stand on a limestone floor.

A short distance west of the chapel stands a striking bell tower of white concrete, formed from two rectangular free-standing bodies joined at the top. It is positioned to catch the eye of visitors approaching along the access road through the surrounding housing, and is linked visually to a long, half-height wall of concrete topped with wood that guides visitors towards the chapel entrance. The wall also serves a practical purpose, screening the cemetery from neighbouring housing and its own car park. A similar boundary treatment appears to the east of the chapel, near storage and maintenance buildings dating from 2010. Nearby stands an older building known as Klockvillan, once part of the historic Kvastekulla farm.

Although consecrated after 1940 — later than the usual cut-off for automatic heritage protection — the chapel and cemetery have been granted protected status by the Swedish National Heritage Board under the Heritage Conservation Act, reflecting the architectural and landscape significance of the site.

In 2023 the chapel was voted, in a public poll reported by local media, as Sweden's most beautiful building in the brutalist style — a reflection of the continuing appreciation for its uncompromising concrete forms set against the Swedish woodland.