Things are looking up in design
Sky-gazing inspires creative studios in North America and Europe
Designer Lee Broom was vacationing at a friend’s house in the Cotswolds, an idyllic part of rural England.
“I’m a city boy, brought up in the Midlands and living in London for the past 25 years, so had never really experienced that intense blanket of stars that you find on a beautiful, clear night in the countryside, with the constellations so clearly marked,” he says.
Broom was so captivated that when he got home, he began designing a lighting collection named Observatory. Since its debut at Salone di Mobile in Milan in the spring, Broom has brought the collection to NYCxDesign 2018. It goes on to London’s Design Festival in September.
The designs interpret the characteristics of sun and star reflection and light refraction in sculptural, spherical forms. Mirror-polished stainless steel and gold spheres are incorporated with concealed LEDs and acrylic discs and tubes, creating light sculptures in the form of pendants, table lamps and wall sconces. The names pay homage to the heavens: Eclipse, Orion, Tidal, Aurora.
The firmament has often been a source of inspiration for decor and furniture designers, and we’re seeing lots of examples right now. Part of the appeal lies in a moody, dramatic palette of blues, blacks and spectral hues, as well as silhouettes that evoke a modernist style.
London-based designer Katja Behre presented a new wallpaper at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair this spring in New York for her Elli Popp line. A matte black background is dotted with vertical, metallic threads, like a meteor shower, or falling rain against a night sky.
New Yorker Sarah Merenda has done a clean, crisp, eightpoint-star-patterned wallpaper that’s offered in several colours on a white or black background.
Brooklyn-based Calico Wallpaper offers several celestial-themed designs. Lunaris has fog-, smoke-and midnight-hued backgrounds with silver overlay that evoke the moon’s surface as seen through a telescope. Aurora, with a soothing palette in an ombre pattern, depicts the sky’s transformation from dawn to dusk. Inverted Spaces, a collaboration with Amsterdam’s B.C. XSY studio, transforms telescopic imagery of constellations into abstracted, matte-painted images. The collection’s colour names take us on a journey into the universe: Corona, Andromeda, Ursa, Cassiopeia.
Health Ceramics , a studio in Sausalito, California, has a new glaze — Cosmos — that evokes deep space and star-filled galaxies for a vase collection. The swirling mixture of dark and light blues and glossy black create the effect.
At West Elm, a collection of inky blue salad plates is scattered with pinpoints of gold constellations.
Avant-garde Italian design house Seletti collaborated with Diesel Living on a porcelain plate collection, Cosmic, with patterns evoking Jupiter, Venus, the sun and the moon.