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DESIGNER PORTRAIT
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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.
1892 - 1984
Robert Dudley Best
