Kosta Boda Glass

Kosta Boda Glass 

Kosta Boda Glass 

From the 1920s, a succession of highly talented designers turned around Kosta Boda.

the fortunes of the ailing Kosta glassworks and gained international renown for the company, Swedish glass, and Scandinavian design.

Kosta's renaissance began with Elis Bergh (1881-1954), who was the company's art director from 1929. It was given a further boost when designer Vicke Lindstrand (1904-83) joined the company in 1950.

Kosta Boda Glass 

He subsequently produced a huge body of designs, both for art glass and domestic ware


. Lindstrand's heavy, blown, clear- cased pieces came to epitomize the Scandinavian style that enjoyed such success in the 1950s. Shapes tended to be simple and thick walled, with curvilinear organic forms, relying on the clarity and quality of the clear glass and subtle use of colour for effect.



 Internal decoration included spiralled and vertical stripes, threading, and the trapped-air Graal and Ariel techniques  that were initially exclusive to Orrefors and Kosta. Many designs incorporated

patterns of internal bubbles.


 Any obvious distortion or misalignment may mean that the piece was originally a second.

At the same time, the sculptor Erik Hoglund (1932-2001) redefined the image of the Boda glassworks with his radical new designs for blown glass in a collaboration that lasted from 1953 to 1973.

Kosta Boda Glass 

Venini-trained Mona Morales-Schildt (1908-99) joined Kosta in 1958, introducing a southern European influence that showed in her Ventana range of vases with thick, clear casing over colour and optical cutting.

Five years later, Bertil Vallien  1938), who had studied in the United States, joined Afors and created a series of designs - mostly in clear glass - that earned him a place in the pantheon of 20th-century Swedish glass designers.

LINDSTRA The talents of the Swedish designer Vicke Lindstrand were matched only by hismusician - he played the church organ - and had worked as a newspaper editor and book illustrator before turning his talents to designing glass, ceramics, and textiles.  At Orrefors and Kosta, his rich artistic background made tiim equally at home with figurative and abstract esigns, one-off studio pieces, domestic glassware, d sculpture, creating both small-scale pieces and e complex structures for public spaces.

Kosta Boda Glass