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The Bestlite lamp have been designed in 1930 by Robert Dudley Best. Because of their unusual conception for its time, he had trouble to find a manufacturer and the first Bestlite have been therefore produced by the Manufaktur & Lloyd, founded in 1840 by an ancestor of the family. In 1932, the magazine Architects saw in the Bestlite the first manifestation of the Bauhaus in Great Britain. Since 2004, the company belongs to the Danish Gubi, which allowed its comeback on the international stage. The lights continue to be manufactured in England. For the record, note that Winston Churchill had chosen a Bestlite as desk lamp.
Dimensions H50 x Ø17,5 cm, cable length 2,5 m Light source 1 x E14
Black / Chrome
Chrome / Chrome
White / Chrome
Bone China / Chrome
Bone China / Brass
Grey / Brass
Brass / Brass
Black / Brass
White / Brass
Black Brass / Black Brass
White / Black Brass
Bone China / Black Brass
Robert Dudley Best
Robert Dudley Best (1892-1984) was heir to the world's largest lighting manufacturing company Best & Lloyd, founded in Birmingham in 1840. Despite the company's proud history of providing traditional lamps to a prestigious clientele, including Titanic and the Orient Express, Dudley Best was interested in a new collection that symbolised the spirit of the new age by appealing to the more avant-garde architects and setting a new agenda for lamp design.
Robert Dudley Best, a keen design enthusiast on top of his prominence as a young industrialist, spent the 1920's travelling around Europe meeting designers and furthering his interest in modernist movement. After visiting the Exhibition of Modern Design in Paris in 1925, where many of the designs exhibited were influenced by the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, he enrolled at the School of Industrial Design in Düsseldoft and in Paris. Interested in breaking the barriers between industrial and artistic merit, Dudley Best's ideals were shared by his friend Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement. It was during this period that Dudley Best made the first sketches of what would become the iconic Bestlite design.
Following Bauhaus principles, Dudley Best had done away with the trimmings and detail of traditional Best & Lloyd products; he had both commercial and domestic use in mind and believed that lighting should be functional and practical as well as elegant. With this in mind, he returned to Birmingham in 1930, determined to put his Bestlite lamp design into production.