bulb bullée – c table lamp pear

Designing a lamp that captures the magic of blowing a glass bell has long been on Christiens wish list. Or as she says: “I wanted to design a lamp where you can preserve that first magical moment when the air from the lungs of the glassblower forms a bubble of glass to the blowpipe.”
To capture this magic, Christien developed a lamp that only consists of the parts needed to blow the glass: a blowpipe, a wooden mold, and glass. The appearance of the light is the result of these three elements.
With master glassblower Gert Bullée of the National Glass Museum Leerdam, a bell is blown on a copper blowpipe. Copper and glass have the same shrinkage, so the glass remains firmly attached to the blowpipe during cooling. The wooden mold in which the bell is blown then serves as the base for the lamp.
A specially made lighting source, with a lifespan of 50.000 hours, is ingeniously inserted into the blowpipe, and the technical installation is hidden in the wooden mold.
The pear tree used for these molds grew close to Christien’s studio and the National Glassmuseum Leerdam, making it a very local production.
For good stability, the table lamp’s base is weighted at the bottom with wrapped recycled lead from a power cable located at the North Sea’s bottom.