DURING THE 1990s, Estelle Nordenfalk was a well-known face in Sweden, starring in one of the first panel programmes on Swedish television, Knesset on ZTV, and later becoming managing director of a television production company. She was feted as a shining light of the media industry.
Today, however, Nordenfalk opens the door to her home wearing a pair of jogging bottoms and a relaxed V-neck sweater, ready for yoga. Over the past decade her line of work has been markedly different. She finds herself in a world that stands, for the most part, in stark contrast to the superficial world of celebrity glamour. In 2006 she became the owner and manager of Yogayama, a yoga studio with two Stockholm locations, in Östermalm and Hammarby Sjöstad.
Nordenfalk has a passionate interest in yoga. “The first time I came into contact with yoga was when I had terrible back pain – I could barely get in and out of the car though I hadn’t even turned 30,” she says. She visited a doctor who happened to work with the ancient practice of Ayurveda, and through him went to her first yoga class in a cellar in Kungsholmen, Stockholm, where everyone was wearing orange-coloured clothes. “It was a far cry from today’s yoga,” she says.
Nordenfalk took over as managing director of Yogayama when the studio had been active for less than a year. “It wasn’t exactly easy in the beginning,” she says. “It was a 700 square metre space for a market that did not yet exist. We had to bite the bullet and wait for the yoga hype to start.”
Eventually the yoga mats multiplied, with ambassadors such as Madonna and Rachel Bråthén (known as yoga_girl on Instagram, with 1.7 million followers) playing their part
