Danish Luxury

Design Lighting Louis Poulsen

PH 5

Poul Henningsen's pendant of 1958, a set of shades that hides the bulb, made by Louis Poulsen.

Designed by
Poul Henningsen
First made
1958

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A white PH 5 pendant above a coffee table
A white PH 5 pendant above a coffee table

Pictures © Louis Poulsen, from louispoulsen.com.

Why it is renowned

The PH 5 is the most popular of Poul Henningsen's lamps, and Nordiska museet in Stockholm holds a cut-away PH 5 that was used at Konstfack to teach interior architects how its shades spread the light.1 Henningsen's many-shaded lamps began with a gold medal at the Paris exhibition of 1925,2 and his PH table lamp of 1927 is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.3

The story

Henningsen spent his career on glare-free light: his lamps reflect and screen the light of the bulb so that none of it reaches the eye directly.2 In 1926 and 1927 he turned his early designs into a three-shade system.2 He designed the PH 5 in 1958, the year of the PH Artichoke, so that bulbs of any shape and size could be used in it without glare.45 Of its four outer shades, the top one sends light upward and the others down; inside, a red surface warmed the light and a blue shade helped it render colour.1 Louis Poulsen, which makes it, later took the coloured shades out, as newer light sources come closer to daylight.4

Sources
  1. Taklampa, Nordiska museet. digitaltmuseum.se, read 28 September 2026.
  2. Poul Henningsen, Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org, read 28 September 2026.
  3. "PH" Table Lamp, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. collectionapi.metmuseum.org, read 28 September 2026.
  4. PH 5, Louis Poulsen. louispoulsen.com, read 17 October 2026.
  5. Artichoke Lamp, Art Institute of Chicago. api.artic.edu, read 28 September 2026.

Checked 17 October 2026, against the maker's own pages.