Scandinavian Ceiling Lamp by Carl Thore for Granhaga Metallindustri

Sigurd 'Carl Thore' Lindkvist was born in 1916 in Åmål, Sweden. Lindkvist worked for the lighting firm Luko, before joining Granhaga Metallindustri AB in 1961 as Head of Sales and Lighting Design. Lindkvist apparently adopted the pseudonym Carl Thore when he was presenting his lights to a client. Not wanting to reveal to the customer his identity as a designer, Lindkvist used his two middle names instead. The lights were labeled ‘Carl Thore Design’ from then on.  Lindkvist remained with the company until he retired in 1981.

In the postwar era, Scandinavian designer-architects explored new ways in which they could defuse and redirect light. Lindkvist falls into the category of designers producing minimalist, sculptured Space Age table lamps, wall lights, and pendants, especially in copper, aluminum, brightly-colored glass, and plastic. In fact, much like Poul Henningsen’s PH Lamp Series (from 1925) for Louis Poulsen, Lindkvist created a series of layered shades—known officially as concentric parabolic-section cowls—to spread the light while concealing the lightbulb for his appropriately named Trava Lamp (1960s), meaning 'Stack' in English. This glare-free approach was perfect for the reduction of the harsh, glaring bulbs available at the time of production.

Today, the Trava Lamp is the most popular and widely distributed of Lindkvist’s Carl Thore lamp designs, as well as his best-known design today. The lamp appears in many guises, as it was produced with several variations of style, size, and color. It was mainly sold in Sweden through the Swedish Consumer Cooperative chain of shops known as KF Interior, but it was also exported to Denmark, the UK, the Netherlands, and even as far as South Africa.

Recently, the production of Carl Thore Design has often been misattributed to the Danish modern lighting manufacturing company Fog & Mørup. This is most likely because Lindkvist’s designs clearly reference Fog & Mørup’s head designer Jo Hammerborg’s (1920-1982) Nova Pendant Light (1963).

Lindkvist’s date of death is unknown, as are the details of his other designs for Granhaga.

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.