Large Swedish Aluminium Pendant Lamp by Carl Thore for Granhaga, 1960s

Swedish modernist lighting manufacturer Granhaga Metallindustri was founded at the end of World War II (ca. 1947) by Sven Persson in Töreboda, Sweden. While its products included a variety of lighting fixtures, the firm was best known for its Sigurd Lindkvist line of layered, biomorphic pendants, which Lindkvist himself (under the pseudonym, “Carl Thore”) designed over his twenty-year tenure as Granhaga’s Head of Sales and Lighting Design.

Lindkvist’s time at Granhage, which began in 1961, coincided with an era of rich innovation in Scandinavian lighting design when architect-designers like Poul Henningson, Hans-Agne Jakobsson, and Jo Hammerborg were exploring new approaches to light diffusion. Lindkvist’s work for Granhaga took on a decidedly Space Age aesthetic, slightly more flamboyant than the products of contemporaneous Swedish lighting manufacturers, such as Hans Bergström’s and Svend Aage Holm Sørensen’s minimalist-industrial lamps for ASEA in the 1950s and 60s.

Favoring novel forms, Lindkvist created an array of otherworldly fixtures that emitted light with the bulb concealed—table lamps, wall lights, and pendants sheathed in sleek, multi-layered shades in copper, aluminum, brightly-colored glass, and plastic.

Most iconic and lucrative for the Granhaga were Lindkvist’s Trava Pendants (ca. 1960s-1970s). Often misattributed to Fog & Mørup—possibly because they look a bit like Jo Hammerborg’s Nova Pendants(1963)—Trava Lights feature soft, warm, diffused, and multi-toned light and were produced in several iterations of material and size.   

Granhaga rode the heels of Lindkvist’s success—which included international reach within the markets of Europe and South Africa—into the 1970s. In 1979, the company merged with Folke Hermansson and Hugo Andersson’s Hermanders Metallindustri AB to become Nordsales Granhaga AB. After Lindkvist’s retirement in 1981, the company suffered a swift decline, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 1989.