THE BOURGIE
LAMP

This is what can happen when you first want to be an Egyptologist, then your opera-loving father tries to put you at the piano, and then enrolls you in the world’s most famous luthier school in the Italian city of Cremona, where you were born, the city of the equally famous luthier Stradivarius… And then, because you were born in the land of furniture after all, you start working with wood… So, chances are you’ll end up in Milan in architecture universities and furniture schools.

And here you are, a designer. Collaborating with the greatest lighting publishers… so it’s not surprising that one day or another, you’d have the desire and the idea to light up the world with a lamp that would be unique…

The Bourgie has indeed been illuminating the world for nearly twenty-five years. Its creator himself, Ferruccio Laviani, still can’t quite believe it.

He whose gaze, one evening, simply lingered on a sort of wooden candlestick with a silk lampshade… It was the slightly old-fashioned lamp on his desk.

Thinking to himself: hey, what if, with the wave of a magic wand, I gave my lamp some new clothes!

As a wand, he used his pencil, and the Bourgie was almost born.

And the least we can say is that with its three Baroque-style legs and its lampshade like a pleated top hat, it is indeed unique; it cannot be confused with any other.

All made of transparent polycarbonate, in other words, plastic. The Kartell brand’s favorite material.

The 10th Anniversary

And to give you proof that it really shook up the lighting sphere, I invite you to its tenth anniversary. Half a million copies had already been sold by then!

Back to 2014. The publisher Kartell, in the person of its president Claudio Luti, suggested inviting a group of designers to reinterpret the Bourgie.

Result: The lamp saw all the colors of the rainbow. But not just any colors, no! 14 design stars gathered at its bedside…

He was right. A few examples:
Philippe Starck dressed her as the grand lady of the Eiffel Tower to whom, for the occasion, a river of jewels was offered.
The Swedes from Front Design tilted its leg, metamorphosing it into a strange animal.
Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola turned it into a suspended carousel, and Italian Mario Bellini literally transformed it into a coat rack… As for French designer Patrick Jouin, he stenciled a sentence in English on the lampshade: “The future is a present from the past”. What a birthday party!

But since these marvels are not for sale, if you want to see them, they await you at the gates of Milan, in the permanent exhibition of the Kartell Museum. An exhibition of more than 2,000 square meters… Designed by… the creator of the Bourgie lamp himself. Ferruccio Laviani!