LET THERE BE LIGHT
Custom twists on mid-century style
There’s something a little unnerving — even if it is exhilarating — about seeing one of your own designs fly by on a city bus advertisement. That’s what happened to Denise Murphy, half of the custom lighting-design team Lightmaker Studio, recently. One of the studio’s fixtures is featured on a poster advertising the Interior Design Show in Toronto, where the firm will exhibit for the second time.
“It was fantastic, but it also felt a little strange,” she laughs.
Lightmaker Studio’s custom fixtures represent a growing vanguard in interior design, the microcustom maker. From their tiny Distillery District studio in Toronto, Murphy and her husband/creative partner, Michael Stamler, produce designs with a vaguely mid-century modern vibe, using such honest materials as brass and blown glass.
“I think it’s part of a general movement away from disposable, mass-produced objects,” says Stamler, of the success of small fabricators like Lightmaker. “There’s return to a connection with the maker — people want to be more thoughtful about what they put in their homes now.”
While Stamler, a former industrial designer, builds the company’s products, and Murphy handles the business side, the designs themselves are often collaborative. Also, because pieces are produced one at a time, often to order, there’s opportunity to tailor it to a client’s tastes or space requirements.
Yes, there’s a mid-20th century flavour to the couple’s designs, Murphy agrees, but only a flavour. These are early 21st-century products, not reproductions.
They start with mid-20th-century-inspired icons, such as natural or geometric shapes — spheres, cones, cylinders — and combine them in visually rhythmic ways.
Originally, almost all the company’s designs were based on polished or brushed brass, but this year, they’ve branched out into other metals such as copper and polished or brushed steel, and new finishing techniques like blackening or acid dipping, to deliver a range of different patinas.
For this year’s IDS, they’re introducing seven new designs.
“We want to make beautiful lighting; that’s more important than being able to expand on a global scale,” Murphy says.