GUBI’s Hornbæk Portable Lamp Makes the Same Argument as the Hotel It Was Designed For

Products & Objects · Hornbæk

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Before electric light reached Denmark’s fishing harbours, someone still had to carry a flame from the house to the boat, and back again after dark. GUBI‘s Hornbæk Portable Lamp, made of folded canvas and hand-glazed ceramic, is a considered return to that small, forgotten ritual. It was designed for a hotel that is making exactly the same argument at the scale of a building, by a company whose entire catalogue is built on making it at the scale of a business.

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Introduction

GUBI, the Copenhagen design house, has introduced the Hornbæk Portable Lamp, a cordless table light built from a folded canvas shade, a hand-glazed ceramic base and a ring handle finished in antique brass. It was designed for the CORI Hornbæk Hotel, a restored 1935 seaside hotel on Denmark’s northern coast, due to open in August 2026, and it is now also sold as a standalone piece in GUBI’s own collection in a Poppy Yellow edition, inspired by the golden light of summer evenings on that same stretch of coast.

The obvious story is a hospitality collaboration: a design brand makes a bespoke piece for a hotel opening, and a version of it later reaches general sale. The more interesting story is that the lamp, the hotel and the company that made the lamp are all telling the same story, at three different scales. The hotel is a 1935 building being returned to the exact purpose it was built for. GUBI is a company whose entire modern identity is built on reviving designs the market had let go. The lamp itself revives a specific, physical habit, carrying light from one place to another by hand, that domestic electricity made unnecessary. None of the three had to be an argument about revival. All three are.

What the Hornbæk lamp is actually reviving

Before switched electric lighting reached coastal Denmark, moving light after dark meant physically carrying it: a lantern down to the harbour to meet a boat, a covered flame between a house and a shed, a glow that travelled because a person was holding it. The Hornbæk Portable Lamp is built around that specific memory rather than a general idea of “coastal” design. Its two folded canvas shades are shaped to recall sails catching wind, and the antique brass ring that gathers them at the top does two jobs at once: it holds the shades in position, and it turns the whole object into something with a handle, designed to be lifted and carried rather than simply switched on where it stands.

The base is where the design commits to permanence against the portability of the shade. It is hand-glazed ceramic, heavier and more grounded than the textile above it, and the contrast is doing real work: a lamp built entirely from soft materials would read as a prop, and one built entirely from hard materials would not read as something meant to travel between a spa, a terrace and a guest room in the same evening. Inside, a stainless-steel structure carries the load and allows the whole thing to ship and assemble flat, with the canvas guided into place along discreet internal rails rather than fixed with visible hardware. It is built to be used outdoors as well as in, which matters for a piece meant to move between a hotel’s lounges and its terraces without a change of light fixture in between.

GUBI describes the light it casts as a warm, diffused glow “reminiscent of lanterns guiding sailors along the coast, or the quiet glow of houses along the shore after sunset,” and that is the right register for the object rather than marketing colour. The Poppy Yellow trim carries the same logic outward from Hornbæk specifically: GUBI describes the colour as drawn from “the golden light of summer evenings by the sea and coastal flowers,” which keeps the piece anchored to its origin even once it is sold to someone who has never been to that coastline. A second, hotel-specific colourway was described in earlier coverage of the launch, though GUBI’s own published materials confirm only the Poppy Yellow edition at the time of writing, and that detail is worth checking before this piece goes further than a draft.

A hotel restored to its original purpose

The Hornbæk Portable Lamp was designed for a specific building, and the building’s own story is the same shape as the lamp’s. The CORI Hornbæk Hotel occupies a structure designed in 1935 by the Danish architect Ole Falkentorp as a Badehotel, a seaside bath hotel built for the specific purpose of a healing stay by the water. Falkentorp trained under Heinrich Wenck at the Danish State Railways’ architectural office, working alongside Carl Petersen and Povl Baumann, and his own career moved from Neoclassicism through early Modernism into Functionalism over two decades of Copenhagen commissions, including the Classen Have housing development, the Ved Vesterport office building and, in the same year as the Hornbæk building, Hotel Astoria in central Copenhagen. The Hornbæk Badehotel was one of two hotel commissions he completed in 1935, and it stands as one of the clearer statements of that late functionalist period: a streamlined, Scandinavian reading of the international style, built specifically to bring guests to the sea.

The restoration, led by the Copenhagen studio AART under architect Inês Tavares Correia, is explicit about what it is doing: uniting Falkentorp’s original architecture with a new era of hotel facilities, while preserving as many original details as possible, down to the materials and the interior finishes the building was built with. That is a restoration brief, not a renovation brief. It is not making the building more efficient or more contemporary at the expense of what it was. It is putting the building back to work doing the specific thing it was designed to do in 1935, for a different kind of guest with different expectations of a spa. The interiors are led by Afroditi Krassa, the London-based designer who trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art under Ron Arad before founding her own studio in 2002, and whose earlier hospitality work includes Itsu’s original interior and branding and projects for Rosewood Hotels and One&Only. Her brief for CORI, by her own account, was Scandinavian restraint combined with a sense of barefoot luxury, using bespoke carpentry produced on the owners’ own nearby farm rather than a standard hospitality supply chain.

The same argument, run by a company built to make it

GUBI did not arrive at this brief by accident. The company was established in 1967 by the parents of Jacob Gubi, its current owner and creative director, originally to produce the family’s own furniture designs and trade textiles. Jacob Gubi, born the same year the business started, took the company over and rebuilt it into something quite different from a family furniture maker: a curated design house whose stated purpose is bringing forgotten icons of the past together with new work by contemporary designers, a catalogue spanning close to a century of design history rather than a single studio’s output in a single decade. GUBI’s best-known recent work, the reissued Pierre Paulin F300 chair shown at NYCxDesign, follows exactly that model: a design the market had let go, brought back into production rather than replaced with something new.

The Hornbæk Portable Lamp is that same instinct working at a much smaller scale, on an object rather than an entire catalogue. A company whose business is reviving designs the world had stopped making was asked to design a lamp for a hotel built on reviving a building the world had stopped using for its original purpose, and it answered by reviving a habit, carrying light by hand, that a switch on a wall had made unnecessary. None of those three decisions required the others. That they line up is the reason this is a stronger commission than a standard hospitality furnishing brief, and it is the detail a listings page for the hotel opening will not mention.

What the design argument actually is

Strip away the coastal styling and the Hornbæk Portable Lamp is doing one specific thing: reintroducing the physical act of carrying light as a deliberate feature rather than an inconvenience electricity solved. A plug-in table lamp does not ask to be picked up. A rechargeable one with a handle does, and GUBI has built the handle into the object’s structure rather than adding it as an afterthought, which is the difference between a portable lamp and a lamp that happens to be liftable. That decision only makes sense in a building whose own restoration brief was to bring back a specific historical purpose rather than simply modernise a structure, and it only makes sense as the output of a company whose whole catalogue is an argument for looking backwards before making something new. The lamp is small. The argument underneath it is the same one running through the hotel it was built for and the business that built it.

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Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

A portable lamp is a small commission next to restoring a Danish functionalist landmark, and it would have been easy for GUBI to treat it that way, a coastal-themed accessory to sell in a hotel gift shop. Instead the Hornbæk Portable Lamp answers the same brief the building itself was given: work out what this place used to do, and do that again properly, rather than decorating a modern object to look old. Ole Falkentorp built a Badehotel to bring guests to the sea in 1935. AART and Afroditi Krassa have spent the years since restoring it to do exactly that again. GUBI, a company that has spent its own history bringing forgotten designs back into production, answered with a lamp that revives the specific, physical pleasure of carrying warm light from one place to another after dark. Three different scales, the same argument, made properly at each one.