Large Brutalistic Sculptural Circle Pine Mirror ‘176’

Part furniture and part folk sculpture, this large Scandinavian Modern wall mirror was made in Sweden by Glas Mäster Markaryd in the 1970s. Its solid pine frame, model 176, still carries the maker’s original paper label on the back, complete with a small drawing of the mirror and its number. Along all four sides the wood swells and narrows in a rhythm of bulbs, discs and slender waists, and at the corners the rails cross like logs in a cabin wall.

In 1970s Sweden, pine moved from the farmhouse into the modern living room. Makers loved its honey colour, its open grain and its unpretentious rural character, and they shaped it boldly, with a chunky weight that leans towards the Brutalist taste of the decade. Here the old turned baluster is reimagined, sliced into faceted segments so that every bead shows a flat oval face where the grain fans out in rings. The result reads as both rustic and graphic, traditional woodwork seen through the eyes of its time.

The pine has mellowed to a deep amber, with dark knots scattered here and there and the soft satin sheen of its lacquer. Light traces of use only deepen that lived-in warmth. Hang it in a hallway and it greets you each time you come home, the grain glowing in the evening lamplight. Above a low sideboard, or in a bedroom dressed in linen and wool, it brings the calm of a Swedish summer house, and a frame you will want to touch as you pass.