Hans Agne Jakobsson
In 1953, Hans Agne Jakobsson made his former mentor angry enough to take notice in Åhus — and moved his two-year-old lighting company to Markaryd, the town that would define his name for the next fifty years.
Jakobsson founded Hans-Agne Jakobsson AB in Åhus in 1951 together with his wife, Lisa Jakobsson. The company's rapid breakthrough put a strain on his relationship with Hans Bergström, who ran the lighting firm Ateljé Lyktan in the same town and had been Jakobsson's own mentor there. Morentz's selection focuses on pieces that show his signature move: bending copper, iron and glass into fixtures that soften a room rather than illuminate it head-on.
From Ateljé Lyktan to his own name
Jakobsson studied architecture in Gothenburg, then took an internship with furniture designer Carl Malmsten, worked briefly as an industrial designer for General Motors, and served as an assistant to Werner West at Stockmann AB in Helsinki. It was only once he joined the lighting company Ateljé Lyktan in Åhus, under Hans Bergström, that he found his true calling — and the mentor whose influence would shape his career.
After the 1953 move to Markaryd, Jakobsson built a catalogue of table, floor and ceiling lamps strongly influenced by Poul Henningsen's approach to glare-free, indirect light, exhibiting at venues including the 1957 Milan Triennale. Over roughly fifty years he produced around two thousand distinct lighting models, treating each fixture as a small sculpture without losing sight of the quality of light it produced.
Selectra, Blade, Dôme — and the Fringe
Jakobsson's best-known designs — including the Selectra, Blade and Dôme pendant lamps, and the now-iconic Fringe lamp — show his readiness to experiment with unusual materials and angles, from hammered copper to wood shavings, always in service of a softer, more diffused glow. As Jakobsson put it himself in a 1953 interview, every part of a fixture should hold the designer's own interest, not just its silhouette.
His earliest Åhus-period pieces (1951–53) have a more playful, personal character than the brass fixtures that made him famous in the 1960s and 70s — small-batch, hand-finished work from a period when production was still workshop-scale. That distinction between eras is part of what makes well-preserved early pieces genuine rarities today.
Lampkonstruktion är viktigt. Alla delar i armaturen bör få sitt intresse av konstruktören. ("Lamp construction is important. Every part of the fixture should hold the designer's own interest.")