Interiors

Greta Grossman: The woman who always kept ‘one step ahead’ in male dominated industry

Design Moment: Cobra Lamp, c. 1950

Bernice Harrison's face
Bernice Harrison
Sat Jul 15 2017 - 00:00

While the Cobra lamp is very recognisable, it’s designer’s name is less so, possible because female name-check recognition tends not to be in proportion with their contribution to the design world.

Designed by Greta Grossman (1906-1999) this simple light fixture won the Good Design Award in 1950 and was exhibited at the Good Design Show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has been in production ever since.

The Swedish woman was a design trailblazer, first as a young graduate apprenticed in an otherwise all-male furniture factory; then when she became the first woman to receive a prize for furniture design from the Swedish Society of Industrial Design; and later when having moved to the US in 1940 her shop on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles helped introduce Swedish furniture into the US.

On being a woman in a male dominated industry she said she felt she had to be “one step ahead or else”.

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The Cobra lamp gets its name from its shape – a large oval shade perched on a tubular flexible arm that can rotate 360 degrees. The base is covered in powder coated aluminium, weighted with cast iron.

The Cobra lamp suite includes an elegant floor lamp and a wall lamp – all with the same oval shade.

As well as having her shop, Grossman worked as an interior designer, product designer and architect. She designed her own house – an international style, open-plan split-level property in Los Angeles – and went on to design more than a dozen such houses for her Californian clients.

The first major retrospective of her work took place in Stockholm in 2010 and it was accompanied by the launch of a ‘book about her life: “Greta Magnusson Grossman: A Car and Some Shorts”.

Its curious title comes from when she first arrived in the US, saying she wanted to buy “a car and some shorts” to immerse herself in the culture.

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