"Listen, hear me out. We should move to Sweden."  My husband replies: "Are you drunk?"

I'm standing in Davidshall in Malmö a few nights after midsummer. It is 10.30pm but it’s also Northern Europe, so the square is still dappled in golden evening sunshine. Davidshall is delightfully European and bohemian, people sit at tables drinking wine and eating small plates. There is a park where people play ping-pong and a young woman takes a break from her book, her face upturned to the last rays. The shop windows are full of elegant Scandinavian design, sleek shapes and high quality materials. Whether it's a dress or a sofa, the Swedes just seem to do it better.

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I'm not drunk though I have had one very good margarita and two beers. But I have since walked them off across the length of the small city to visit the pristine beach with water as clear and cold as Evian, to wander round ubiquitous thrift shops full of mid-century furniture and colourful glass lamps, to eat tacos at a microbrewery in one part of the city and then to see a band in the other. I'm only here for a few nights but I am deeply in love with a city which reminds me of Berlin 15 years ago.

And perhaps it would have ended there, a brief, heady holiday fling. Except, in the way you do when you're enjoying yourself in a new city, I took a cursory, day-dreamy look into an estate agent window. The houses were, as you might expect, neutrally decorated, full of light and tasteful right down to the original wood flooring. But what really caught my eye was the price.

In fact, I spent so long fumbling with my phone, making sure that I had the prices right, that the estate agent came out and asked me if I could help with anything, to which I replied: "Oh, no, thank you. I'm just looking. Tak!" And I meant it, I was just looking.

But as the day wore on, as I walked around the idyllic Folkets Park, literally translated as People’s Park, with its outdoor bar and live music, crazy golf and three incredible playgrounds and I watched people cycle around - Malmö is the world’s third most cycling-friendly city - I started to think our family could thrive in Sweden. People seemed…content? Nothing was ostentatious but people seemed to enjoy simple, good things. Indeed I learned there’s a Swedish word for this: lagom. "Just the right amount" or "not too much, not too little"; a striving for balance and contentment in life. Add in world-class education and medical system and daily "fika" cinnamon buns? That sounded pretty good to me.

When I came home from Malmö my husband and I continued our thus-far-fruitless flat hunt in Sheffield. Despite increasing our budget to a level we’re slightly nervous about, one house is in an area so rough that my council estate spidey senses ring loud and clear and we don’t step over the threshold, another has one bulging wall of black mould and the vestiges of decades of accumulated hoarding, the last is a tiny flat in the city centre that smells like kebabs and bin juice. Basically, we cannot afford to stay here. Or we could but do we want to spend everything we have on something that reminds us of the lav in Trainspotting?

And so our family head back to Malmö for a few days, joking that it’s like A Place in the Sun and we need to have glasses of orange juice in front of us at all times and no intention of actually buying. Indeed it is mostly a holiday. We have a fun few days cycling around the city, stopping for ice-cream under red-striped awnings or for a cold bottle of beer, and then going to a couple of open houses, imagining ourselves like actors in a new set. But that’s all it is meant to be, us imagining.

A view of housing in MalmöA view of housing in Malmö On our very last morning we went to see one last apartment. As soon as we walk in, we know. Even our little boy sits at the kitchen table and declares: "I want to sit here forever!" It costs a third less than anywhere we could have bought in the worst condition, in the worst area of Sheffield. It’s unremarkable for Sweden, built in the 1950s with parquet flooring, a big sit-in kitchen and a huge glass balcony, but extraordinary to us. Part of a cooperative association, it comes with access to a boules court, sauna, three playgrounds, bike racks and an affordable guest apartment for visitors. Utilities are bought in bulk so they’re half the price of the UK.

We make an offer 40 minutes after we've seen the apartment while eating pizza and on the train to Copenhagen airport the agent calls and tells us our offer has been accepted. We do a small, excited dance in front of the bewildered Scandinavian passengers. The following week, we get a friend who lives in Malmö to sign the documents for us. The whole process takes less than a week and, just like that, we’re Sweden-bound. While it’s a huge leap of faith, we hope this is the answer to our housing precarity.

There is, of course, an enormous amount of privilege in this: our work allows us to be anywhere in the EU, as does my husband's Swiss citizenship. We had our deposit ready to buy the apartment and we feel comfortable that if it doesn't work out we can sell and return to the UK. But, sometimes, you have to get creative, you have to take a leap of faith. Our leap just happens to be taking us all the way to Malmö.

So perhaps the next time you're looking in an estate agent window while on holiday, and you say to your husband "We should move here", you might be a cocktail and two beers in, but it might also be the answer you've been looking for.

Kerry Hudson is an award-winning, best-selling novelist and memoirist and a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers. You can find her on Instagram and on Threads @ThatKerryHudson