G-10 Floor Lamp by Greta Grossman for Bergboms, 1950s

Born in Helsingborg, Sweden in 1906, Greta Magnusson Grossman’s career spanned across architecture, interior design, and furniture design. In the 1920s, she completed a one-year woodworking apprenticeship in Helsingborg, and was awarded a scholarship to Stockholm’s esteemed Konstfack arts institution, where she studied furniture, textiles, and ceramics design. In 1933, she was awarded the second prize for furniture design by the Stockholm Craft Association, making her the first woman to receive an award in that category.

That same year, Grossman and Konstfack classmate Erik Ullrich opened Studio, a store and design workshop in Stockholm, and she married jazz bandleader Billy Grossman. In 1937, Grossman famously designed a crib for Sweden's Princess Birgitta for a group exhibition at Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum. In 1940, she and her husband immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Los Angeles, where she opened a Beverly Hills shop for her furniture, lighting, and home furnishings designs. Alongside her store, she also designed pieces for companies like Sherman Bertram, Modern Line, Barker Brothers, and Glenn of California.

Between 1949 and 1959, Grossman designed numerous homes in California, often collaborating with landscape architect Garrett Eckbo. Most had a footprint under 1500 square feet, and many stood on stilts overlooking majestic views. During the 1950s, Grossman taught industrial design at the Art Center School in Los Angeles and at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the late 1960s, Grossman retired from design and architecture.

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.