Scandinavia Design

Bestlite BL5 – Gubi

 Robert Dudley Best, 1930

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Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best

The BL5 wall lamp belongs to the Bestlite collection. With its wall-fixed arm on one hand and its mobile arm on the other hand, you can adjust its height and inclination. The BL5 wall lamp is supplied with a 2.5m textile cable with switch and a plug for hardwiring. 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.

Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best

Light source 1 x E14

Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best

Black semi matt / Chrome

Chrome / Chrome

White semi matt / Chrome

Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best

Bone China / Chrome

Black semi matt / Brass

White semi matt / Brass

Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best

Brass / Brass

Grey semi matt / Brass

Bone China / Brass

Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best
Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best

White semi matt / Black Brass

Bone China / Black Brass

Black Brass / Black Brass

Bestlite BL5 Wall Lamp Robert Dudley Best

Robert Dudley Best

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.