Sundowner

Why it is renowned

The Sundowner is known as an early work of Jørn Utzon, the architect of the Sydney Opera House. He drew it in 1948, almost ten years before the Opera House, and its maker reads the opposed shades as a first form of the building's shells.¹ In 2022 the Danish interiors magazine Bo Bedre chose it among 24 sculptural lamps, photographed in the rooms of Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen.²

The story

Jørn Utzon drew the Sundowner in 1948. With the designer Sven Middelboe he spray-lacquered and assembled the shades by hand; in the rationing years after the war, making their own lamps was how both men began to earn a living.¹ The name points to the last light of the day, which shows in the lamp's horizontal middle band.¹

The light falls downward from a white interior, and a gap between the middle shades lets some of it reach the top and bottom shades.¹ The first lamps were a loose set of shades that the owner fitted over the socket. LYFA has relaunched it in three sizes and four colour combinations, with the shades now fixed in place.¹ A special edition in a colour called Mallorcan, a grey beige with a pink tone, refers to the sandstone of Can Lis, the house Utzon built on Mallorca in the 1970s and named after his wife, Lis.¹