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DESIGNER PORTRAIT

Robert Dudley Best

1892 - 1984

Robert Dudley Best was heir to the world’s largest lighting

manufacturing company Best & Lloyd, founded in Birmingham in

1840. Despite the company’s proud history of providing traditional

lamps to a prestigious clientele, including the Titanic and the

Orient Express, Dudley Best was interested in a new collection that

symbolised the spirit of the new age by appealing to the more avant-

garde architects and setting a new agenda for lamp design.

Robert Dudley Best, a keen design enthusiast on top of his

prominence as a young industrialist, spent the 1920s travelling

around Europe meeting designers and furthering his interest in

modernist movement. Interested in breaking the barriers between

industrial and artistic merit, Dudley Best’s ideals were shared by his

friend Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement. It

was during this period that Dudley Best made the first sketches of

what would become the iconic Bestlite design.

Robert Dudley Best was strongly influenced by Bauhaus, which

was taking Europe by storm with its stringent lines and clean style.

Following Bauhaus principles, Dudley Best had done away with

the trimmings and detail of traditional Best & Lloyd products; he

had both commercial and domestic use in mind and believed that

lighting should be functional and practical as well as elegant. With

this in mind, he returned to Birmingham in 1930, determined to put

his Bestlite lamp design into production.