Ardea Personal Light

What's In It For You

Product Story

The Ardea are the great herons—those elegant birds with the long, infinitely flexible necks. Inspired by these majestic birds, Yves Béhar designed the Ardea personal light to be infinitely adjustable. Its ingenious neck design lets you direct Illumination right where you need it—on paperwork, a keyboard, or a good book. And like the herons, Ardea is kind to the earth.

Form Follows Function

Louis Sullivan said it; Ardea embodies it. The lamp's fluid aesthetic is a direct result of its mechanical performance. Flexible hinges at the base and head, continuous with the rigid structure, allow infinite direction of the light and significantly expand both the range of motion and light output. The Ardea neck can extend from a task position of 18-1/2 inches to 34-1/2 inches.

Put it Anywhere

It isn't just the neck that makes the lamp so flexible. A range of attachment brackets allow Ardea to be freestanding or clamped to a work surface, or mounted on Action Office panels or Ethospace and Vivo frames and their tool rails. The compact fluorescent bulb has a reflector for even illumination distribution in any position.
The hinges are continuous with the rigid structure, and the aluminum extrusion is twisted in a new, innovative manufacturing process, giving the design stability, as well as a sculptural, organic flow. Ardea is available in several finishes.

Environmental Enlightenment

Ardea was developed for energy efficiency and to meet our own stringent environmental protocol. So all materials and manufacturing processes aimed for minimum environmental impact.
Energy efficient. The compact mini-fluorescent 13-watt bulb is a low consumer of electricity—.17 amps at 120v. It uses about one-fourth the electricity that an incandescent bulb uses and lasts three to four times longer.

Earth-friendly. Ardea is made of 12% recycled materials and is up to 84% recyclable at the end of its useful life.

The Ardea personal light is part of The Be Collection, a group of products that connect people to their work in new and better ways. San Francisco designer Yves Béhar, of fuseproject, wanted the Ardea personal light to both reflect nature and have a minimal impact on it.
An admirer of Charles and Ray Eames, Béhar decided that he too wanted to collaborate with Herman Miller. "Design is very much at the center of Herman Miller's culture," he says. "So one day I just picked up the phone, called them, and said, 'Let's work together.'" Four years later, we introduced his two brilliantly innovative lighting products, Ardea and Leaf.
Béhar says he's very content designing products for companies who are "looking for departure, change, transformation. I'm continually excited working with people who want to move forward into the future and on to the next generation."