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| May 2002 |
| Telegraph Magazine |
| Lena Bergstrom - The Sun Seeker |
Finding Swedish glass designer Lena Bergstrom’s apartment is no easy task. A maze of button pressing, codes, clanking doors and rickety lifts brings you to the sixth floor of a Sixties block in the heart of Stockholm. Turn left out of the lift and you step into an internal courtyard that could be straight from a Mediterranean town. The row of front doors is clean and neat, and each sports a nameplate for its occupants. Except the one with two chairs outside the front door. This is the entrance to the apartment that Bergström shares with her husband, Olle Johansson.
It is a classic example of a meticulously designed, purpose-built apartment, and I have to say I am a bit of a fan. ‘It has been designed around light with the purpose of bringing the sun inside. It’s not about lots of spaces that you don’t use.’ says Bergström. Once inside, you step from the hall into the dining area with its open-plan kitchen and tiny balcony, and then downstairs into an open L-shaped sitting room with an office in one corner and an open fire in the other. Off it runs the bedroom, Bergstrom’s studio and the bathroom. With its white walls and wooden floors you would be forgiven for thinking this is just another homage to the monastic modernist home. But when you meet Bergström, you soon realise that the apartment is not at all contrived but an essential tool of her trade. ‘If you work with ideas you don’t want distractions.’ she says, her passion for work exuding through her smile. ‘I work with shapes, colours and thoughts all at the same time so keeping the apartment simple is like a kind of meditation. If you have things all around you it does not make you feel good.’ If that isn’t a eulogy to the clear-the-clutter mantra, I don’t know what is.
Both Bergström and Johansson work from home so the space has to work for them. Like nomads they follow the sun as it moves around the building. ‘In the morning we are in the studio because it has the sun, and then we move to the office in the afternoon. In wintertime we are mainly downstairs because there is a balcony.’
What decoration they have (new friends ask when they are going to finish furnishing, while old friends shrug in despair at their lack of pictures) is largely monochromatic with the odd splash of colour. Bergström explains it away as logical: ‘It’s because it lasts and it isn’t a trend. Buy a sofa ina basic colour and you can change the cushions. I want to keep the sofa for a long time so I bought something that is simple and of good quality.
‘I choose pure things,’ she continues. Purity, colour, light are all words that are very much part of Bergstrom’s life. That and Orrefors, the Swedish glass company, with which she is closely involved.
Orrefors began life in 1898 as a small firm of glass producers who stood for a breaking down of barriers between technology and art. Since then it has built up a ground-breaking portfolio of work, achieved for the most part by inviting designers from other fields to join its glass-producing studio in Smaland. With fashionable supporters such as west London glass store Vessel, Orrefors is gradually changing the image of glassware from something that gathers dust, to something to show off.
It was in 1991 that Bergström joined Orrefors, having trained as a textile designer. ‘I fell in love with glass. When you work with it you have to be so fast. Glass is a sensual material which I love, but you need patience to work with it too.’
Her work pushes the boundaries of what can be done with glass. ‘Usually with glass you blow then you cut, but I thought let’s put it back on the heat again.’ Other designs have developed from accidents. The Squeeze range, for example, which comprises pieces that look as if they’ve been pinched in the middle, came into being when an over-talkative glass blower left a vase in the furnace just a second too long. Her new range of bowls and vases come in bold abstract colours. ‘But I would never use pink,’ she says, ‘probably because I’m a feminist.’
Every second week she makes a trip down to the Orrefors factory, set among far-reaching pine forests. In all she spends about ten days each month here in a very quiet wood cabin. The contrast is refreshing and inspiring,’ she says. ‘The change in my environment gives me a fresh way of looking. It’s like having a wide-angle view.’
She would never live near Orrefors full-time though, as she needs the stimulation of life in her Stockholm apartment as well. Then, with typical Nordic directness she adds, ‘I have freedom.’ She nods towards Johansson and smiles. ‘If you get space then you are happy.’
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| Jo Denbury |
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