Margit Skarsgård and Anders Holm started the workshop in 2009 to do one job well — to keep classic cars running, registered, and on the road. The rental side started seven years later, by accident, when a customer asked if she could borrow the Saab for the weekend. The Saab, gentle reader, never came home.
Margit and Anders rent a three-bay workshop on the northern edge of the city. The plan is simple: service classic cars for other people, get good at one decade, then add another. The first car through the door is a 1973 Volvo 145, brakes howling.
The workshop owns its first classic outright — the 1981 Saab 900 Turbo that is now File No. 001. It is bought because Anders couldn't bear to see it sold for parts. It still runs today. It still smells faintly of pipe smoke from the previous owner.
A regular customer asks if she can borrow the Saab for a long weekend in the country. We say yes. She returns it on Sunday evening with a full tank, a thank-you card, and a list of three friends who want to do the same. The rental business is born, without anyone having planned it.
The workshop expands. Two more bays, a separate wash bay, the first dedicated paint booth. The garage book reaches fifteen cars across the three eras we now specialise in. Margit hires the first non-family employee — a young mechanic from Gothenburg, still with us.
Twenty-eight cars in the garage. Six people on the team. Two thousand and four hundred weekends rented out, give or take. The 1973 Volvo 145 is still in the workshop, owned now by Margit's son, who is twenty-three and learning to drive it.
The whole team works in the same building. When you call the desk, the person who picks up has, more often than not, also been under one of these cars that week.
Started the workshop in 2009. Knows every car by sound and most by smell. Will not lend out the Pagoda to anyone who has not driven a manual gearbox in the last five years.
Spent fifteen years at a Stuttgart restoration shop before coming home. The reason the Mercedes runs the way it does. The reason the BMW also runs the way it does. The reason for most of it, really.
Picks up the phone. Knows which car suits which weekend. Will tell you, gently but firmly, that no, you cannot rent the Jaguar for a stag party. She drives the 1969 Volvo P1800 to work.