March 24, 2024It may seem an unlikely pairing at first: the venerated, 150-year-old Danish lighting company Louis Poulsen and a couple of New York City creatives whose experience ranges from set design, filmmaking and fashion modeling to glassblowing and launching a homeware brand, Home in Heven, with a new shop in Manhattan’s East Village. But seeming opposites often make the best matches.
Last spring, in anticipation of the 3DaysofDesign expo held every June in Copenhagen, Louis Poulsen decided to give a 21st-century twist to a few of its classic 20th-century lighting designs and reached out to Heven’s Breanna Box and Peter Dupont to ask them if they wanted to have a go. The couple (they married in November) had a smashing success in 2022 with their oval-shaped glass handbags for the French ready-to-wear brand Coperni, spotted on the arms of celebs like Kylie Jenner and Doja Cat. Box and Dupont were excited by the prospect of the lighting collaboration. “Because I’m Danish, I thought it was a great idea,” says the Copenhagen-born Dupont. “Poulsen liked our ideas and gave us freedom to move along.”
The result is a special edition of seven new designs in handblown glass, all reimagined icons — most originally by the lighting luminary Poul Henningsen (1894–1967), with one by Danish architect Vilhelm Lauritzen (1894–1984) — now being offered on 1stDibs Auctions.
Working with current versions of the Louis Poulsen lamps, Box and Dupont repurposed the metal parts and designed new shades, then had them executed by master glassblower Elliot Walker in Birmingham, England. “We make glass prototypes and design in glass, but with a timeline of two to three months, we needed someone who has the experience and precision Elliot has,” Box explains.
Box and Dupont gave audacious makeovers to such well-known pieces as Louis Poulsen’s PH5, a three-shaded metal lamp from 1958 that became a familiar fixture in homes and offices worldwide, both as a table lamp and as a pendant. “Ours are not exact replicas, because of the difference in material and the thinness we could achieve,” Dupont says — not to mention the lighthearted liberties the couple took with the designs. The PH5 was the starting point for three of Heven’s reimaginings: one in opaline glass, one “the color of a salmon filet,” as Box puts it, and a mini version that “looks a bit like an exploded flower with an egg on top.” “We based that one on the smaller PH5 and made it our own,” Dupont notes.
“We had one rule of thumb,” Box says. “Poulsen wanted us to use their new pale-rose color. But I tried to sneak in as much color as possible. We couldn’t do everything pink.” In their envisioning, the Question Mark table lamp, designed by Henningsen in 1931 and so-called because of the curvature of its brass stem, is pink with gray Saturn rings. Heven’s update of the petite Pale Rose table lamp, officially named PH3/2 and introduced in the 1920s, looks similar to the original, but only at first glance. It sprouts an unexpected pair of delicate glass horns — “a signature of ours,” says Dupont.
Influences as varied as movies and undersea life came into play as Dupont and Box created the series. Another table lamp is an opaque baby blue with a transparent blue swirl around each shade. “I was watching a lot of Almodóvar at the time,” says Box, referring to the Spanish filmmaker, known for his vibrant palette. “That comes through in the hot colors.” And the milky tones of the opalescent PH5 pendant were inspired by black-and-white film noir, says Box, who hails originally from Los Angeles. “I’m obsessed with opaline glass, which isn’t used much any more — it’s very dramatic.”
Both Box and Dupont are recreational scuba divers and love the sea, which is how the spirals and tentacles on the round VL45 Radiohus pendant, a 1940s design conceived by Lauritzen, came about. “I wanted that one to be as weird as possible,” Box says. “My brain flashed on Japanese animé, which often displays underwater creatures with tentacles.” Their Radiohus spin-off differs from the rest of the group in its matte finish; it’s the only one whose surface was sandblasted so that it looks, in Box’s words, “like a gumdrop.”
The freethinking duo, who met on a modeling assignment in London and moved to New York three years ago, are still engaged with the world of film, where they deploy the same quirky, good-humored approach that characterizes their unconventional lighting designs for Louis Poulsen. One of Box’s late relatives figures, somewhat improbably, into Heven’s business plan. “The whole reason we started this company in the first place was to raise money to make a film about my grandfather, who was a gangster and had a wild life,” Box says.
Meanwhile, one of her grandmothers, a veteran professional florist, relocated recently from the Midwest to share the couple’s Brooklyn loft and does floral design out of the East Village shop, which also sells handblown glass vases. “I made her viral on TikTok,” Box says with a laugh, describing her grandmother’s popular social media account, @marylouinthecity, as “little perks of joy.” Which also happens to be an apt description of the couple’s heavenly takes on a most iconic group of vintage lamps.
