Ambition more bold than blond

Boing, boing. At the opening night of “Designed in Sweden,” the contemporary furniture exhibition at the Pacific Design Center running through April 15, a woman of a certain age pushed the magenta cushion on the ZigZag chair and watched it spring back into position. The chair’s creator, Michael Malmborg, stood by mute, his eyes going boing-boing in mock horror beneath a rock-star fringe of hair.

Formerly the owner of a Stockholm advertising agency, Malmborg, 42, should be used to such market testing. The lounge chair -- a serpentine upholstered piece suspended on a cantilevered stainless steel base -- is part of a collection meant to push design to be as provocative as it is modern.

“For years, Sweden has been known for glass and inexpensive functional furniture,” Malmborg said as he viewed fellow Swedes’ designs, including Thomas Eriksson’s early ‘90s red-cross cabinet, a medicine chest with a shape and color that telegraphs its purpose as a storage unit for first-aid supplies.

“Now,” he continued, touching a pendant lamp composed of a bare bulb surrounded by a scalloped and red-flocked wire shade, “we would like to be known for bringing sophistication and luxury, a 21st century twist into Swedish design.”

Sweden has a long, rich tradition of craftsmanship. Furniture from the Gustavian period -- with its emphasis on pale woods, decorative painting and simplified patterns that emulated florid forms found in nature -- is admired by many interior decorators. Recently it was reinterpreted for the fashion retailer Anthropologie’s furniture.

“In the mid-20th century, Sweden and Denmark exported a lot of rosewood and teak pieces -- the furniture people associate with Scandinavian modern,” said Andrew Wilder, owner of Svenska Mobler, a gallery of pre-World War II Swedish modernism on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. Sweden’s 20th century designers, however, rarely achieved the international acclaim of their neighbors, Danes such as Hans Wegner and Arne Jacobsen or Finns including Eero Saarinen and Alvar Aalto.

“After [Scandinavian Modern] fell out of favor, nobody took Sweden seriously at all, but throughout history, they’ve been making amazing furniture,” Wilder says.

Malmborg is part of a new generation trying to differentiate the Swedish sensibility from the catch-all label of “Scandinavian modern.”

Though there are minimalist chairs and striking examples of glass at the Pacific Design Center show -- notably, black vessels etched with folkloric motifs and a gaggle of tall pastel vases by Kosta Boda -- the other crafts are artfully represented. A pewter candlestick by Sissi Westerberg is cast to look like a fluted column of wax, melted onto a tabletop. Textiles are precisely patterned with laser cut designs or as irreverently random as the Stained Wool Carpet, a white rug created by David & Martin that appears to be splattered with red paint. That team also brings whimsy to product design, transforming a simple barbecue grill into a high-tech hibachi, with a green enameled casing and a grill that resembles a tangle of vines.

Author and “Designed in Sweden” curator Bradley Quinn said in a companion book to the exhibit that the new breed of Swedish designers created “beautiful tools for modern life ... that bridge the gulf between everyday functionality and ideals of comfort, efficiency and beauty.”

The furniture provides striking examples of the emerging Swedish style. Fredrik Mattson and Stefan Borselius’ Snooze chair looked every inch like an Italian lounger on a tubular metal base, but upon closer inspection, its upholstered seat was embellished with a raised scrollwork quilting. Marie- Louise Gustafsson’s Follow Me Bench, a chain of starkly grained wood blocks with hidden castors linked by a nylon belt, was primitive and modern, an exaggerated pull toy for adults.

“Now that there is a focus on Scandinavian design again,” Wilder said, “people are responding to the purity of Swedish design, which is a hybrid of precise engineering and a timeless sense of shape and scale.”

As a result, the charismatic Malmborg has become the poster boy of sorts for the movement, which has the backing of a government that decreed 2005 to be Design Year in Sweden. His company, Lyx, snagged Elle Decor’s 2004 Rising Star Award with a launch collection of only eight pieces, including a bent teak and white leather wing chair and ottoman that sells for $11,700. Lyx is premiering on the West Coast at Twentieth on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Orrefors and IKEA may have become household names in mass-market America, but Malmborg would rather produce items of “the highest quality, not quantity.”

“Our mission,” he said of the company he founded in 2003, “is to be more bold than blond.”

Such brass has already reaped raves for Lyx (www.lyx .com), whose name suggests a Nordic heavy metal group but is really the Swedish word for “luxury.” Though many of the pieces are over-scaled, their simple form and elegant proportions are masterfully understated.

“We took clean lines and added a bit of extravagance,” Malmborg said of the mirror-polished steel Cell coffee table, which looks like an oversized flattened man’s ring that Tom Ford might have designed for Gucci, with a curvaceous mirror polished stainless steel base and a macassar top. The LightSpeaker, a floor lamp designed to look like a stereo woofer and tweeter, complete with a volume knob as the dimmer, is a witty piece that could become a bachelor pad classic.

Many contemporary Swedish furnishings transcend mere decoration and address the future of design. Using new technologies to transform humble materials into innovative products, Lyx has created Topografi, a modular “seating system” composed of laser-cut MDF, and Kristall, a halogen light fixture that turns plastic rods into a fiber-optic starburst sculpture.

For the Swedes, however, design is only part of the equation.

“The Italians make the most beautiful contemporary furniture in the world, but it takes them too long,” said Malmborg, who will have some items assembled in North Carolina for quick U.S. delivery. “We are going to compete with the high-style of the Italians and offer the efficiency of Swedish and American manufacturing.”

Malmborg also is scouting the U.S. for design talent and recently acquired the production rights for Matthew Miller’s Cyma table, winner of the Future Furniture competition sponsored by Interior Design magazine. The table, a glass surface held in place by three aluminum slide-on legs, will be unveiled at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair next month in New York.

The show also will mark the premiere of a collaboration between Lyx and Harald Belker, a former Porsche designer based in Marina del Rey who created the Batmobile for the “Batman” films. Belker’s first creation, the Maxelle indoor-outdoor chair that resembles a concept sports car, is available in custom colors and finishes -- all for a mere $3,000. Boing!