Mårten Cyrén | ScandinavianDesign.com

Mårten Cyrén is a Swedish furniture and lighting designer known for cast outdoor pieces for Byarums Bruk and the Quartz lighting series for Noral. Born in 1958, he grew up inside Orrefors glassworks itself, where his father Gunnar Cyrén worked as a designer through the 1960s — the factory floor was, by his own account, his childhood playground, and it left him with a lasting feel for materials and how things are made.

Background

After training in interior architecture and furniture design, Cyrén worked as a consultant for several architecture firms before establishing his own design practice. That production-first grounding — understanding a manufacturing process closely enough to know what it can and can’t do — has stayed the core of his approach ever since.

Byarums Bruk and casting

Cyrén has designed for Byarums Bruk since 2001, working almost exclusively in cast iron and aluminium for outdoor furniture and planters. He describes his method as letting the casting process itself lead the design, rather than treating it as a constraint to work around. The Blom planters are a clear example: double-curved lines, a rim, and legs set flush to the ground, the whole piece cast in one part. Later pieces for the company include the Seriffe table (2015) and the Piccolo sofa (2015).

Storängen Design

For Storängen Design, Cyrén created the Trip side table (2000), a birch two-height table made in a cross-border craft exchange between Snickarakademin in Kristianstad and the Heinola Arts and Crafts School in Finland — his role was to work directly with the Finnish students, passing on the working relationship between designer and craftsperson. He later designed the larger Storängen Grand sofa for the same manufacturer.

Lighting for Noral

In 2007 Cyrén designed Quartz for Noral, an outdoor lighting series built around frosted glass panels: a large wall fixture giving both down- and uplight, a smaller version for entrances and terraces, and a sign light for house numbers. The series carries the same emphasis running through his furniture work — comfortable, functional light solved through the material and the manufacturing process rather than applied as decoration afterward.

Family and Popglas

Cyrén is the son of glass designer Gunnar Cyrén, who died in 2013. Together with his brothers Gustav and Henrik, he has revived their father’s best-known work, the striped 1966 Popglas series, now produced in full again with glassblowers Stefan and Mikael Erlandsson at Ulvens Glashytta outside Uppsala.