PH Louvre Pendant: Hanging Height, Weight and the Louvre Principle

The PH Louvre Pendant is the largest of Poul Henningsen's glare-free globes for the home: 600 mm wide, 650 mm tall and 22.6 kg once assembled. This piece explains how its thirteen louvres work, how much vertical room a shade of that height needs over a table, and what a ceiling has to be made of before you hang one.

The louvre principle: thirteen shades, one globe

Most of Henningsen's pendants use three shades. The PH 5 family, for example, stacks a top shade and two smaller lower shades so that the bulb is hidden and the light is thrown down and out. The PH Louvre takes the same idea and multiplies it. Thirteen horizontal shades are stacked on four slender supports, and together they read as a single luminous sphere.

Each louvre is a narrow ring of aluminium, angled so that light from the central source strikes its surface and is reflected downward and outward. Because the rings overlap in profile, you never look straight into the source, whether you stand beneath the lamp, beside it or on a stair above it. What you see instead is a series of lit bands, brightest on their inner edges, fading towards the outside. The eye reads the whole globe as evenly bright, which is why the lamp glows as a complete sphere rather than as a bright point with a shadowed crown.

The design grew out of a commission for the Adventist Church in Skodsborg, north of Copenhagen, and it distils ideas Henningsen had explored in his far more complex Spiral pendant for Aarhus University. The Spiral was ambitious and difficult to build; the Louvre turned the same layered-light thinking into something calmer and repeatable, which is why Louis Poulsen still produces it.

Materials, light source and control

The shades are white lacquered aluminium with a high-lustre finish on top and a matt finish on the underside. That split is deliberate. The glossy upper face of each louvre catches light and throws it on towards the room, while the matt underside diffuses what you see when you look up at the lamp. The frame that holds the rings is bright chrome-plated aluminium, and the pendant hangs from 4 m of white fabric cord with a canopy included.

• Light source: integrated LED, 96 W, offered in 2700K or 3000K.
• Dimming: via Bluetooth using the Casambi app, so no dedicated wall dimmer is required.
• Rating: IP20, for indoor use.

The colour temperature choice matters more than it seems on paper. At 2700K the white lacquer takes on a warm, slightly creamy tone that suits timber floors and evening dining. At 3000K the globe looks crisper and cleaner, which can sit better in a stairwell with white walls and daylight from above. Because the LED is integrated, choose once and choose for the room where the lamp will actually hang.

How high to hang a 650 mm tall shade

A pendant over a dining table is usually hung with the bottom of the shade roughly 60–70 cm above the tabletop: low enough to light the surface, high enough to keep sight lines open across the table. With most pendants that rule is the end of the calculation. With the PH Louvre it is only the start, because the shade itself is 650 mm tall.

Put the lowest louvre 60–70 cm above the table and the top of the globe sits around 125–135 cm above the tabletop, before you add any cord between the shade and the canopy. Add the height of your table to that figure and you have a realistic minimum ceiling height for hanging the lamp at dining height. In a room with a standard ceiling, the numbers become tight quickly, and the globe can end up looking wedged between table and ceiling instead of floating.

This is why the PH Louvre is most at home in spaces with height: a double-height living room, a generous entrance hall, a stairwell, or a dining room with a raised or pitched ceiling. In a stairwell the rule changes again. There the lamp is seen from below, from the side and from above as you climb, and the priority is clearance for people and a position where the globe reads as a whole. Hang it centred in the void, high enough that no one on the stairs can reach it, and let the louvres do the work.

For a fuller walk-through of table heights and shade sizes across the family, see our guide on how high to hang a PH pendant over a dining table.

Fixing 22.6 kg to a ceiling

Weight is the part of the PH Louvre that is easy to overlook when you see it glowing in a photograph. At 22.6 kg it is a serious load. For perspective, the PH 5/5 Pendant weighs 5.9 kg in its E27 version and 8.7 kg with an integrated LED, so the Louvre is nearly four times the lighter version and more than two and a half times the heavier one. Even the PH Artichoke Pendant Lamp in its Ø 720 size, which shares the Louvre's 650 mm height, starts from 12.4 kg.

In practice this means three things:

1. Anchor into structure, not plaster. A plasterboard ceiling on its own is not a fixing point for this weight. The suspension needs to be secured into a joist, a concrete slab, or a timber noggin fitted between joists for the purpose.
2. Check the rating of the ceiling fitting. Many ceiling boxes and hooks are made for ordinary pendants. Ask your electrician to confirm that the box, hook or bracket is rated for the load, and to replace it if not.
3. Plan the installation with two people. Lifting a 600 mm globe to ceiling height while connecting the cord is not a one-person job, especially over a stairwell.

Plan this before the lamp arrives. In a new build or renovation, adding a noggin or a load-rated fixing while the ceiling is open is simple. After the ceiling is finished it means cutting and patching.

PH Louvre, PH 5/5 or PH Artichoke

If the height or the ceiling structure rules the Louvre out, two other Henningsen pendants offer a similar glare-free character in different forms.

The PH 5/5 directs more of its light down onto a table, and at 430 mm tall it sits far more comfortably under an ordinary ceiling. The Artichoke is the more sculptural choice, with leaves that catch light in a way the smooth louvres never do. The PH Louvre is the calmest of the three: a single white sphere that lights a space from the middle outwards. To compare the wider range of shapes and sizes, browse our pendant lamps collection.