Furniture and Lighting by Greta Magnusson Grossman
Featuring photographs of her work by Julius Shulman
Grossman’s relationship with the Arcadia furniture company Glenn of California afforded her the opportunity to really grow as a designer and to create some of her most visually interesting pieces from the 1950s. In return, Grossman’s second "Good Design" award, given for a Glenn chair that she designed in 1952, supplied them with a marketing label "keynoting the design superiority of Glenn furniture."
The series that brought her the most acclaim with Glenn can be divided, stylistically, into two groups. The first featured several cocktail and console tables, and was produced in walnut, with an option of white laminate on the coffee tables, or walnut with a formica inlay. The surface of the coffee table, number 6217 in the catalog, was a long, thin oval and her signature touch was the solid walnut dowel-shaped legs that curved out from beneath on stretchers. A larger version of the console, or buffet, had a woven cane shelf underneath.
The second style within this series has since become her best-known work. This group was comprised of several tables of varying sizes, and desks, made out of walnut, with round walnut tips at the end of black iron legs. The surfaces of both storage units and desks could also be ordered in formica. The pieces from this series represent a union of all Grossman's styles to date. In a recent interview, Bob Baron, who started Glenn of California with his father, recounted that the normal production run for Grossman's pieces would have been, at most, in the hundreds, and occasionally as few as thirty.R Home | Gallery | Designer Bios | Bookstore | About Us | Contact
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