Arne Jacobsen designed the Bellevue lamp early in his career, the year of the Great Depression of 1929, when everyone felt the need for a new environment and a new lifestyle. He designed it for the Future House, a house he made in partnership with his friend Flemming Lassen for an exhibition in Copenhagen.

The house has been kept like the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies Van Der Rohe and the Weissenhof Siedlung Van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier. It was a circular construction, cut by straight lines and sharp angles.

The lamp Bellevue is an echoes of this duality, with its curves and taut lines.

Shade ø19,5 cm

Light source 1x socket E27

Arne Jacobsen is born on February 11, 1902 in Copenhagen. His father, Johan Jacobsen, is a wholesale trader in safety pins and snap fasteners. His mother, Pouline Jacobsen, a bank clerk, paints floral motifs in her spare time. The family lived in a typical Victorian style home. As a contrast to his parents’ overly decorated taste, Arne paints his room in white.

Background & school relations

He met the Lassen brothers at Nærum Boarding School: later, Flemming Lassen was to become his partner in a series of architectural projects. Arne Jacobsen is a restless pupil, always up to pranks, with a self-deprecating humour. Already as a child, he showed an extraordinary talent for drawing and depicting nature through scrupulous studies. He wants to be painter, but his father felt that architect was a more sensible choice.

The Pleasant and the necessary trips abroad

Jacobsen’s travelling begin already in his twenties, when he went to sea to New York. Then followed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer in Germany and a series of study and drawing excursions to Italy. Jacobsen produced some of his finest watercolours during this period, capturing atmospheres and shapes accurately and carefully. From the beginning of his career, Jacobsen turned his gaze abroad, without abandoning Danish traditions.

Arne Jacobsen behind the design

Jacobsen production reflects his personality: an insistent, perfectionist modernist, to whom no detail was trivial, although the main picture was basically black/white and unambiguous. On the other hand, the nature-loving botanist and jovial family man: like him, his work is precise and warm, Danish and universal, modern and timeless.