GUBI has brought back one of the most beautiful lamps Murano ever produced. Carlo Nason's Lotus Table Lamp, designed in 1969 and out of production for more than 50 years, is now back in GUBI's lighting collection, made the old way from four nested shades of mouth-blown glass.
A lamp named by its collectors
When it first came out, the lamp carried the plain model name LT305. Collectors soon started calling it Lotus because of its layered, petal-like silhouette, and the nickname stuck. Switch it on and the effect gets stronger. The glass grows more transparent as it lights up, the layers come into focus one by one, and the flower shape reveals itself from the inside out. The stacked shades also hide the bulb entirely, so what you see is a soft, even glow instead of a bright point of light.
That is a big part of the appeal. Most iconic midcentury lamps are about a sculptural shade. Lotus is about what the light does once it passes through glass, and GUBI's own editorial on the lamp leans into exactly that.
How it is made
GUBI has published a detailed look at the making of Lotus, and the process is serious craft. Each of the four shades starts as a gather of molten glass pulled from the furnace by a master glassblower, worked at temperatures between 1,100 and 1,200°C. While the glass is still hot it goes through the pulegoso technique, a traditional Italian method from the early twentieth century. The glass is rolled in fine granules that set off a reaction, trapping thousands of microscopic air bubbles inside the clear layers. Those bubbles scatter the light and give the lamp its diffused, semi-opaque texture.
Each shade is then mouth-blown into a precision mold at its own scale, so the four pieces nest together cleanly. Every shade is hand-inspected for proportion, wall thickness, transparency and bubble distribution, then annealed slowly to relieve stress in the glass. Finally the four layers are assembled around an engineered steel structure that holds them in place and keeps the light source out of sight. No two shades come out exactly alike, so every Lotus is a one-off. The current version pairs a Bubble Glass shade with a Black Chrome base.
Who Carlo Nason was
Carlo Nason (1935 to 2026) was born in Murano into one of its oldest glassmaking families. His father, Vincenzo Nason, led the glassworks Nason Moretti before founding his own factory, V Nason & C, in the 1930s, and Carlo grew up lighting the coal-fired ovens beside him. Over five decades he produced more than 1,000 glass objects, from lamps and vases to tableware and sculpture, and his work is held in collections including the Corning Museum of Glass. He lived in the Murano home where he was born until his death in May 2026.
His son, Alberto Nason, has described the revival as both emotional and inspiring, saying GUBI's curious, experimental approach to historical design is a natural match for his father's way of thinking.
Our call
This one is Surfacing. Reissues are everywhere right now, but few are this hard to make or this tied to one place and one family. Lotus is a lamp that looks like a sculpture when it is off and like a glowing flower when it is on, and its return lands as a quiet tribute to Nason after his passing this year.
More lighting and revivals: our best design lamps guide, GUBI's M Chair by Marcel Gascoin, and the Louis Poulsen PH 1/1 Piano table lamp.
GUBI Lotus Table Lamp · The Lotus Table Lamp editorial · The making of Lotus · Carlo Nason at GUBI
