ManufacturerDanish
Le Klint
1 active items
The story of Le Klint reaches back to around 1900, when the Danish architect and engineer Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint folded a lampshade for his own home. The design was functional and inventive: a pleated form that used the material's own elasticity to stay in place, without string or additional fastening. Jensen-Klint's solution drew loosely on Japanese paper-folding traditions, and it remained a household object rather than a commercial product for decades.
It was his son Tage Klint who moved the design toward production. Tage patented the grip-collar mechanism in 1938, the element that made the shade self-securing on its frame, and in 1943 founded the company in Odense, Denmark. He named it after his daughter Lise Le Charlotte Klint, who was among the first to help with production. The original Nr. 1 shade has remained in continuous production since the founding year, and is still assembled by hand in the same way.
The company grew through close involvement with some of the central figures of Danish design. Tage's brother Kaare Klint, an architect widely credited as the originator of the "Danish Modern" movement and professor at the Royal Danish Academy, contributed lamp designs and helped shape the aesthetic direction of the company. His approach, grounding design in the proportions of the human body and the functional demands of use, aligned naturally with what Le Klint was doing with light and material. Kaare's son Esben Klint (1915-1969) also designed a significant number of models.
Gunnar Biilmann-Petersen brought a different sensibility to the company, working as a graphic artist and colorist. His glass table lamp designs, including the Nr. 302 from 1939 and the Nr. 343 from 1962, introduced more visual weight and chromatic interest alongside the paper shades. Vilhelm Wohlert, an architect who studied under Kaare Klint and later became professor of structural art at the Academy, designed the Model 204 in 1957, a wall lamp known informally as "The Mushroom", as well as the Nr. 325 floor lamp in Oregon pine, both of which became enduring parts of the catalogue.
Poul Christiansen contributed a technical advance in the late 1960s, designing the Sinus line by combining sine wave curves that, when folded, produce spherical shades. This extended the vocabulary of the pleated form beyond the cylindrical and conical shapes that had defined it.
All production has remained in Odense, where the hand-folding technique is still carried out by craftspeople trained in the method. The shades require no cutting, the pleating itself creates the form, and each one takes several hours to make.
In the Nordic auction market, Le Klint appears across 85 lots, with lighting making up the overwhelming share. Danish auction houses have been most active, particularly Palsgaard Kunstauktioner with 18 lots and Woxholt Auktioner with 12. The top prices reflect demand for designer-attributed models: table lamps by Gunnar Biilmann-Petersen have reached 7,500 SEK, and wall lamps by Vilhelm Wohlert have sold for 7,200 SEK and 6,597 EUR respectively. Vintage pieces from the mid-century period, especially those with clear model numbers and designer attribution, consistently outperform generic examples at auction.