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Louis Poulsen’s Yuh is designed not for, but around you

It rises, it drops, it tilts and it turns to your fancy. Louis Poulsen transforms the everyday lamp into an intuitive personal object and puts the light, literally, in your hands.

Text by Kenny Loh

The beauty about Danish design is its simplicity and functionality. Its products, be it a building, a chair or even the knob of a door, are typically good looking (in modern-day speak: Instagram-worthy) and clever, often improving a person’s way of life or solving the problems that may revolve around it.

You can find that same beauty at Louis Poulsen, a Copenhagen lighting company whose philosophy is to ‘design to shape light’. Its lamps, which are developed by some of the industry’s most prominent names, are practical, but not at the expense of style. A handful of those lamps, including the PH by Poul Henningsen, the AJ by Arne Jacobsen and the Panthella by Verner Panton, have also gone on to become some of design’s most iconic.


But that’s not all that makes Louis Poulsen’s lamps so covetable among architects, designers and well-heeled homeowners. The award-winning brand’s noble goal is to establish an effortless relationship between people and the light in their surroundings. What its gorgeous lighting products and accessories offer that so many others of its kind tend to forget is intuitiveness. Some brands design for people, Louis Poulsen designs around people. And because its lamps are easily adaptable for the needs of people in different spaces and at different times of the day, there is virtually something for everyone.

The epitome of that humanistic goal is Louis Poulsen’s new Yuh lamp, which is designed by Danish and Italian architects Stine Gam and Enrico Fratesi – the brains behind GamFratesi, a Copenhagen design studio famed for combining, in experimental ways, classic Danish furniture and craft traditions with an intellectual and conceptual approach that’s classically Italian.

“We were inspired by the AJ lamp by Arne Jacobsen. There was something very striking about its geometry,” Gam recalls. “It’s angled, but the shade is designed in such a way that one part of it is always aligned with the floor in one way or another. It’s extremely sculptural but also very geometric.”


Flexibility was the key element that elevated Yuh from lamp to personal object. Requiring minimal space, the shade rotates, tilts, rises and drops, illuminating and creating the desired ambience in any required area. “Our biggest challenge was to design the lamp so that it could be moved in several directions. This made it very complex. It was a huge challenge, but there is a fantastic team of engineers at Louis Poulsen with whom we had a very good working relationship,” Fratesi adds.

Every part of the lamp serves a purpose. For instance, the slim opening at the top of the adjustable shade provides soft, ambient upward illumination. And true to Louis Poulsen’s commitment to design products that are pleasing to the eye, there’s absolutely no unsightly glare with Yuh.

Yuh comes in black or white and in three variations: a table lamp, a floor lamp and a wall lamp.


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