Danish architect Anne Boysen’s fascination with light and spatiality led her to design a lamp that evokes feelings of play and exploration. The design, which Boysen calls “Moonsetter,” won the nationally televised Next Danish Design Classic competition in 2020. The outstanding lamp was introduced in Denmark in collaboration with Louis Poulsen in 2020, and went on to win both a Wallpaper Design Award and a Bo Bedre Design Award. Moonsetter is launching worldwide in fall 2022.
Boysen teamed up with Louis Poulsen after creating the prototype for her eye-catching floor lamp during the televised competition. In collaboration with Louis Poulsen, Boysen made the final design iterations necessary to start production of the lamp.
Having worked and experimented a great deal with lighting when decorating showrooms and private homes, Boysen knew all about how to create moods with it. The task in the design competition was to create a floor lamp that shaped spaces within a space.
“I’m at my desk one night, when I suddenly see it. A ray of moonlight shone through a gap in the curtains. I put different surfaces in front of it and became fascinated with how something white produced a diffused reflection of light—and a mirror, quite another type of reflection. So I asked myself, ‘how do you simplify this in an accessible idiom, making the complex simple and intuitive,’” Boysen says.
Founded on basic geometric shapes with a circle, square, and cylinder, Moonsetter merges into a unique and artistic configuration. All three volumes are essential, as each depends on the other in order for the piece to come together as one, both in function and as a construction.
“I wanted to create an object with a simple design language, which served as a sculpture when the light was turned off. And as I have a penchant for graphic forms, because they’re so elementary that everyone gets them—and because we will also use them 50 years from now, everything went like a breeze from then on. And in all its complexity, the lamp could not be simplified any further. Everything in it has a function, a raison d'être,” Boysen explains.
The frame of the sculptural floor lamp is made of solid chrome-plated, mirror-polished aluminum. It has a rotating disc that allows the user to customize the reflection of the glare-free light that is emitted by an LED light source submerged in the frame. The lamp is turned on and off by the rotating footswitch on the cylinder, which also acts as a dimmer.
The disc rotates 360° around its axis and is white on one side and reflective on the other. Turned toward the white side, the light becomes soft and diffused, whereas the opposite side reflects the light directly—creating a different expression.
The disc allows us to interact with the fixture and decide how the light should be reflected in the room, and how the room should be reflected in the mirrored surface of the lamp.
Moonsetter invites us to explore and not only see the quality of the design but to feel and sense it too. This exceptional floor lamp blurs the lines between sculpture and light source, serving an aesthetic purpose as well as a functional one.
“My designs are all about passing on my own experience to the users. I need to have a gut feeling about every design and to understand it with my body. With Moonsetter, I wanted to activate the whole body, as I believe that we learn and experience life best through our senses. You shape the light with the disc and sense the kind of mood you create. And you dim the light with your foot,” Anne Boysen explains.
Like a piece of art, the sculptural aesthetic of the floor lamp takes center stage in any interior, attracting attention by shaping the space through reflections and light.
Moonsetter was introduced in Denmark in 2021, and it will be launched worldwide in fall 2022. The lamp will be produced in consecutive series of 100 pieces, and each lamp will be signed with its unique serial number.
About Anne Boysen
The architect and designer Anne Boysen works in the intersection between art, design and architecture. Boysen’s work is defined by attention to detail, genuine craftsmanship and a feeling of timeless aesthetics. Her architectural training is expressed in her consideration of how we relate to a space and the objects in it, from a broader perspective. The physical and emotional feeling that can be expressed by a design object is important to Boysen. She works with the senses as a key component in the design experience, resulting in harmonious designs in dialogue with people and their surroundings. Boysen is a color and material connoisseur, and her style and compositions continue to surprise the design world.
About Louis Poulsen
Founded in 1874, the Danish lighting manufacturer Louis Poulsen creates products that encompass the duality of design and light. Every detail in the design has a purpose. Every design starts and ends with light. Louis Poulsen offers a range of lighting aimed at the commercial and domestic lighting markets, with illumination and solutions for both indoor and outdoor applications. In close partnership with designers, architects, and other talents like Poul Henningsen, Arne Jacobsen, Verner Panton, Vilhelm Lauritzen, Øivind Slaatto, Olafur Eliasson, Oki Sato, and Anne Boysen, Louis Poulsen has established itself as one of the key global suppliers of architectural and decorative lighting and has a global presence with showrooms in Copenhagen, Miami, Oslo, Tokyo, Singapore and Dusseldorf.