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Niclas Hoflin
1 actieve items
Niclas Hoflin is a Swedish lighting designer and the founder of RUBN, a lighting brand he established in 2010 and based in Vittsjö in southern Sweden. His interest in light began early and, by his own account, he was experimenting with DIY lighting solutions as a child. The serious professional grounding came in his thirties, when he worked alongside Danish designer Ole Palsby, a mentor whose emphasis on material precision and functional clarity left a lasting mark on Hoflin's approach.
RUBN -- the name a contraction of the Swedish word for "rubbing" or, informally, from Hoflin's first name rendered phonetically -- operates as a family business. Hoflin runs the studio together with his son and daughter. Every lamp in the collection is manufactured by hand at the Vittsjö workshop, a practice that is central to the brand's identity rather than merely a marketing claim: production, design development, and material selection all happen in-house.
Hoflin's design language is spare and functional without being minimal in a cold sense. His recurring materials are solid brass, brushed steel, iron, and leather -- combinations that reference workshop and industrial traditions while remaining domestically warm. The Arkipelag lamp, RUBN's original design, features a flexible neck that can be repositioned in any direction and was inspired by the topology of the Swedish archipelago: a landscape of distributed, autonomous points of light. The Long John pendant -- a slender brass-and-leather suspension available with up to seven adjustable LED heads -- has become one of the studio's most internationally recognised pieces, sold through design retailers across Europe and the UK. The Kavalier table lamp and the Miller lamp round out a collection characterised by clean geometry and material honesty.
RUBN's work is stocked by design retailers including twentytwentyone (London), Viaduct Furniture, and distributors across Germany, France, and Australia. The brand has exhibited at international design trade fairs and been covered in European interior design publications.
On Auctionist, Hoflin's lamps appear as secondary-market items at Swedish auction houses including Roslagens Auktionsverk, Stockholms Auktionsverk and Auktionshuset Kolonn. Our platform holds 32 lots in total, with 1 currently active. The Kavalier table lamp is the most frequently traded model, typically selling as pairs in the 500-900 EUR range. The Arkipelag floor-and-table lamp has sold at up to 805 EUR. The Miller brass table lamp achieved 1,800 SEK.