Diego Fortunato has developed a lamp that summons the French Bouillotte table lamp.
“I wanted to design a product with a historical reference because people in these times of uncertainty love to have some references to the past”

Manufactured by VIBIA

Text by James MacLachlan, Editor ICON Magazine. September 2016

Diego Fortunato’s latest lamp is a quiet, adaptable design – but hides a revolutionary past. When not beheading aristocrats, a favourite pastime of the French during the revolution was a card game, La Bouillotte. A variation of Brag, the game proved so popular that eventually a special table and lamp were developed to play it. The ornate Bouillotte lamp was a sophisticated piece of design comprising one or more candlesticks with a flameproof adjustable metal shade painted reflective white on the inside. As the candles burned, the shade could be lowered. Occasionally, a Bouillotte lamp pops up at antique auctions, but it is a typology as dead as King Louis.An unusual inspiration then for Mayfair lamp, Diego Fortunato’s latest product for Spanish lighting brand Vibia, especially when you consider that the London-based designer’s most successful product for Vibia is Jazz – an ultra-modern, tulip-shaped floor lamp.For the latest collaboration, Fortunato has developed a lamp that attempts to summon something of the Bouillotte civilising spirit. ‘I wanted to design a product with a historical reference because people, in these times of uncertainty, love to have some reference to the past. We have all seen these lamps in old houses and films.Fortunato’s take on the Bouillotte is an exercise in quiet, adaptable design, coming in table, floor and pendant variants. The pendant also comes in single or multiple diffusers. Most of the finishes – matt white, graphite and gold – are chosen to help the lamp blend into its environment. Only the polished copper acknowledges contemporary trends. Fortunato says that the strength of the Mayfair is its universality, with the different finishes giving it a chameleon-like quality: “It could go anywhere: your house, office, hotel.”The designer adds that the lamp was very much the result of a collaborative process with Vibia chief executive Pere Llonch, who has “very clear ideas about what he wants. For me, it is like family because I have known them for so long. That's why I am working directly with the owner.” Fortunato is currently working on new premises for the 255-year-old Colnaghi gallery, which is relocating from Old Bond Street to a bigger space in nearby Bury Street. “I have designed the new gallery in a similar spirit to Mayfair. The idea is to bring an old company into the present and I am going to put Mayfair lamps on every desk. It will look amazing.”

Adorable Folding Lamp (detail)

The lampshade is collapsible in one easy move.