Never Static
Bilboquet, designed by Philippe Malouin for Flos (image: Fabian Frinzel).
“In the beginning I had a stick coming out of a ball and was very interested in the movement that I could create with it.”
Philippe Malouin is reflecting on how he settled on the final design for Bilboquet, his new light for Italian brand Flos. “The brief was to make a tabletop light with an accessible standpoint that would appeal to my generation – so millennials and gen Zs,” he says. He then decided to combine this with his interest in movement. He already had the flexibility of a ball on a stick, but felt there was still an element missing. “I’ve previously experimented with things like weight and gravity,” he says, “so I tried to push this somewhere else. That was magnetism.”
Malouin’s route to magnetism was not straightforward, however. The final design is named after a French 16th-century wooden cup-and-ball game, in reference to the basic movement that Malouin had initially been investigating. In a traditional bilboquet, the two elements of the object are attached by a string, and after flicking the ball up, you try to catch it in the cup. It is a design that relies on gravity – the force Malouin was now seeking to replace with magnetism. A transformation was required.
In Malouin’s Bilboquet, the wooden ball has become a magnetic ball joint, sat snug in a cylindrical base. The string, meanwhile, has become an electrical cable, tethered to an identical cylinder that forms the lamp’s head. The head can magnetically click on and off the ball as desired, meaning the light is free to swivel and point across the ball bearing, all while remaining tethered. At one elevation, Bilboquet is a desk lamp; at another an uplighter, or an ambient light bouncing off the wall. There’s a playfulness to the joint, underlined by purpose: “I had to go magnetic in order to have the right amount of friction and the right amount of force for the light to stay in place,” explains Malouin.
Bilboquet’s flexible, magnetic construction means the lamp can play the role of multiple different lights, as well as making it easy to transport. The lamp is priced at £247, but Malouin was also attentive to areas beyond the base price that might make users feel that the design is good value for money. “It shouldn’t be too big,” says Malouin, “because a lot of people are renting and live in furnished flats, so you have very little that’s yours to actually carry on to the next place.” This, then, is his answer for a light that can appeal to younger generations, untethered as they may be from a permanent living space. “You could put it in a bag with your clothes, pick up and go,” says Malouin. “It’s for people my age, most of whom are still renting or moving around.
Words Evi Hall
Photographs Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.