Robert Dudley Best
1892 - 1984 (England)
Born in Birmingham, England in the late 19th Century, Robert Dudley Best was a man with lighting in his blood. As the heir to the world's largest lighting factory, he was always destined to step into the field of interior design, but his eccentricity and flair pushed his designs into a direction that few could have predicted. In the mid-20s, feeling that his company's range was outdated, he took on a major tour of Europe, visiting the Exhibition of Modern Art in Paris, where he was heavily influenced by the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. He would go onto study design in Paris and Dusseldorf, meeting and befriending Walter Gropius, the co-founder of the Bauhaus Movement in the process. It was Gropius who would leave a lasting impression on his work, which is present in his most famous range, the Bestlite Series.
Born in Birmingham, England in the late 19th Century, Robert Dudley Best was a man with lighting in his blood. As the heir to the world's largest lighting factory, he was always destined to step into the field of interior design, but his eccentricity and flair pushed his designs into a direction that few could have predicted. In the mid-20s, feeling that his company's range was outdated, he took on a major tour of Europe, visiting the Exhibition of Modern Art in Paris, where he was heavily influenced by the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. He would go onto study design in Paris and Dusseldorf, meeting and befriending Walter Gropius, the co-founder of the Bauhaus Movement in the process. It was Gropius who would leave a lasting impression on his work, which is present in his most famous range, the Bestlite Series.
