Sarah Kay Table Lamp

Materials: Pine wood base. Round fabric lampshade with metal parts. White painted Bakelite E14 socket.

Height: 33 cm / 12.99”

Lampshade: ∅ 24 cm / 9.44”

Base: ∅ 10,5 cm / 4.13”

Electricity: 1 bulb E14, 1 x 60 watt maximum, 110/220 volt.
Any type of light bulb can be used, not a specific one preferred. However a small round bulb gives the most beautiful result.

Period: 1970s.

Designer: Vivien Kubbos.

Manufacturer: Massive, Mortsel, Wommelgem and Kontich, Belgium. (attributed)

Other versions: Several different table lamps were produced, also pendant lamps.

The electric parts of this Sarah Kay table lamp were produced in the late 70’s or early 80’s by VLM Components from Italy.

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Vivien Kubbos

Vivien Kubbos, born in the 1940’s, was a freelance illustrator from Sidney, Australia who began creating Sarah Kay collections for Valentines Sands Greeting Cards in the early 1970s. The name Sarah Kay has it’s origin in the name of her fathers dog Sarah and the Kay is K for Kubbos. The works of Vivien Kubbos were “discovered” by two book publishers from Liege in Belgium and extended to Germany, Italy, Spain and Latin America. It was an instant success.

Holly Hobbie

Vivien Kubbos wasn’t the first who draw girls figures with dresses with aprons and hats. It was Denise Holly Ulinskas with drawings from a girl named Holly Hobbie with a patchwork dress and a big hat. Denise Holly Ulinskas married Douglas Hobbie in 1964. In the late 1960s she designed for the American Greetings Company. Later in life she started to draw Toot & Puddle. In 2006, a redesigned Holly Hobbie was launched.

Miss Petticoat, Jaklien

Many others had success with this kind of art. In the UK it was Miss Petticoat that also became popular in the 1970’s. In Belgium we had Jaklien (Jacqueline Moerman, 1931-2011).

Massive

Massive was in origin a bronze foundry and they produced mainly candlesticks, crucifixes and chandeliers in Wilrijk near Antwerp, Belgium. The company was founded in 1926 by Pieter-Jozef De Jaeck. His son Eddy De Jaeck was responsible for the huge expansion of the company in the 1970s. But it were his sons, Piet and Jan De Jaeck who made Massive a true multinational. Thus, they moved production to Eastern Europe and China.

In the 1980s Massive became the leading brand in Europe. In 2002, the brothers left the company to the investment fund CVC Capital Partners, for allegedly more than 250 million euros. Since 2008 the company is owned by Philips and the name of the shops is changed into Light Gallery.

When the takeover by Philips was announced in November 2006 Massive commercialised more than 10.000 lighting products under brand names such as Massive, TRIO and Lirio. The group had about 5.000 employees worldwide and was active in 70 countries.

Massive sold many lamps made by others. Peill + Putzler from Germany and Yamada Shomei from Japan produced lamps for Massive, to name a few. Many other lighting companies did.