Handcrafted Contemporary Danish Lighting by Le Klint

Amongst the most respected Danish modern lighting brands, Le Klint is a venerable manufacturer best known for its collection of hand-pleated white pendant lamps. Founded in 1943 by Kaare Klint, a seminal figure in the Danish Modern movement, and his brother Tage Klint, Le Klint has made its name with a range of ethereal modern pendant lamps crafted from sheets of PVC plastic—each lampshade hand-composed into layered, sculptural forms. By seizing upon the diffused lighting properties of PVC, and creating an innovative system of decorative folds and pleats, Le Klint has melded material innovation with functional craft in service of a collection of contemporary lamps, each hand assembled with the same meticulous care formulated at its inception more than 70 years ago.

Le Klint’s iconic Pendant 172 was designed in 1971 by Poul Christiansen

The most famous of the Le Klint modern lighting collection,  Le Klint 172 Pendant Lamp is the invention of Poul Christiansen, who, as a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Architecture, was recruited by Le Klint to add a different dimension to the straight lines that characterized the company’s lamps until then. Christiansen based his lampshade designs on mathematical sine curves, giving a whole new twist (literally) to the straight-edged geometry of the Le Klint range—and forever making curves as much a part of the Le Klint typology as straight lines.

Swirl Pendant Lamps, designed by Øivind Slaatto for Le Klint

Maximum illumination with minimum glare was the impetus  behind the deliciously tactile Swirl collection of pendant lamps by Øivind Slaatto, who took his inspiration from the Fibonacci mathematical sequence, and it various manifestations in nature—specifically, the form of a snail’s shell. “The snail shell fascinates me as nothing else. It’s shape is so pure and honest, mathematical, efficient and very strong for its minimal weight,” Slaatto explains. A design years in the making, Swirl’s exacting construction and bottom closure disperses nuanced light evenly, without a sliver of glare, even when viewed directly from below.