GCR Design has been selected for the Global Elite Awards Top 100 in 2026, placing the Oslo interior design studio among the 100 companies selected worldwide that the programme considers to be setting the standard across the international luxury landscape. The selection recognises four decades of interior design led by Gunvor Catherin Røkholt, and a body of work that has helped define how Norway’s most distinctive places to stay look, feel, and tell their story.
Four Decades of Norwegian Interiors
Gunvor Catherin Røkholt is one of Norway’s most profiled interior designers, and has worked with interiors since 1984. Through GCR Design in Oslo, she works across private homes, leisure properties, and commercial interiors, from city apartments and family houses to mountain cabins, a west-coast vicarage, and a traditional torp in the Swedish forests.
In recent years, her studio has designed the interiors of some of the most exclusive places to stay in Norway, among them Knutholmen in Kalvåg, Åmot gård in Sunnfjord, Riddertunet in Beitostølen, Fjærland Fjordstove Hotel, and Reinheimen Lodge, as well as projects in Aurland in Sogn. Collaboration sits at the centre of every project, and the studio’s strength in human relationships is as much part of its reputation as its design.
Cultural Heritage, Kept in Use
Røkholt’s vision is to safeguard Norwegian cultural heritage through use, careful tourism, and local experiences, rather than treating it as a museum piece. An active champion of the United Nations’ goal to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage, she builds each concept around the personality of a place and the re-use of resources. At Knutholmen in the fishing village of Kalvåg, rooms are wallpapered and painted to evoke the early twentieth century while offering distinctly modern comfort; elsewhere, a wooden sheep’s drinking trough becomes a wash basin, its history present without needing to be explained.
For Røkholt, modern luxury is less about material excess than about personality: the feeling, on arrival, that real thought has gone into a place, and the chance to enjoy it with minimal impact on the environment. She looks for a clear concept that captures the essence of each place and what its owners want to present, and the clearer that concept, the more the guest experience stands out.
A Personal Language of Colour
Røkholt’s interiors are more maximalist than minimalist: colour, texture, fabric, and contrasting styles are brought together to create comfortable, welcoming rooms that reflect their surroundings, the time we live in, and the people who will live and work in them. Her books Fargerik Kulturarv (Colourful Heritage), published in 2021 and featuring nine of the properties she is proudest of, and Fargerik innredning share that approach with a wider audience, alongside her own design collections.
What the Top 100 Recognition Signals
The Global Elite Awards Top 100 is the programme’s most selective annual editorial list, identifying the 100 most exceptional companies selected worldwide from the wider cohort, across every industry the awards cover.
For GCR Design, the recognition places the studio among the small group of companies the panel regards as reference names in their field, and confirms its position as one of the most consistently distinguished interior design studios in Scandinavia.
It is not a routine addition to an award page. It is the tier the programme reserves for companies that have earned their place through years of consistent work at the highest standard their field can demand.
For more information visit gcrdesign.no and globaleliteawards.com.
