Pendant Lamp by Alf Svensson for Bergboms, Sweden, 1950s

Swedish furniture designer Alf Svensson (1929-1992) was particularly active in the 1950s through the ‘70s, designing , storage , tables , and seating  for a variety of influential manufacturers. Not a wealth of information is available on Svensson, and even though it is evident that his work spans various fields of furniture design, it is his seating designs that are best represented on the vintage market.

During the 1950s, like many of his Swedish and Scandinavian contemporaries, Svensson utilized traditional materials such as richly grained teak and rosewood, and leather to create pieces that were typically designed in the Scandinavian modern style. Examples include the Contour Lounge Chair (1950s) and the Te-Ve Chair (1953) for Ljungs Industrier; the Congo Easy Chair (1954) for Haga Fors; the sectional Domus 1 Chair (1955) for Dux, which was originally designed for the H55 exhibition in Helsinborg, Sweden; and a high back reclining lounge chair (1957) for Fritz Hansen. Svensson also designed tables for Tingströms, lighting for Bergboms, and storage solutions for Bjästa.

Svensson’s designs for the Swedish furniture maker Dux are arguably his most well-known. In particular, his collection of easy chairs and lounge chairs - known as the Form Series - which was designed in the 1960s and ‘70s. Other designs include, the Galaxy Chair (1968 with Yngve Sandström), which has a molded plastic shell that rests on a white lacquered aluminum swivel-base; and the swiveling Contourette Roto Chair (1960s).

Bergboms—also called Bergbom & Co AB—was a modernist, Swedish lighting manufacturer established in 1940. The company’s founder, Efraim Ljung, was a business mogul who also founded Ljungs Industrier, the precursor to the iconic DUX furniture manufacturing company, for which designers like Alf Svensson and Edward Wormley contributed flagship designs.

While the granular details of Bergboms’s history remain obscure, the company’s general arc is less murky. Active in the postwar period, Bergboms produced a variety of sleek, often directional modernist lighting for the Swedish market—a range similar to contemporaneous Swedish brand ASEA. Bergboms’s lighting designs spanned table, desk, wall, and floor lamps, as well as pendants and chandeliers, in a range of materials from brass and steel to ceramic and glass.

While many of these designs that are found on the vintage market today are presented without designer attribution, there are notable exceptions, for instance Alf Svensson’s Swedish Pendant and Opaline Glass Pendants (both ca. 1950s)—created in the years when Svensson also designed for DUX and Fritz Hansen. Other standout series include Aldo Londi’s glazed ceramic table lamps (ca. 1960s and 1970s), which Londi’s manufacturer, Bitossi, produced for Bergboms; and the crowning gem of all, Greta Magnusson Grossman’s beloved G33 Gräshoppa Lamp (ca. 1947), hailed as one of the most desirable modernist designs of the past century.