Leading lights
THIS COUPLE DESIGNS AND HAND-BUILDS ONE SUPER COOL CUSTOM FIXTURE AT A TIME
There’s something a little unnerving — even if it is exhilarating — about seeing one of your own designs fly by on a TTC bus advertisement. That’s what happened to Denise Murphy, half of the custom lighting-design team Lightmaker Studio a few weeks ago. One of the studio’s fixtures is featured on a poster advertising the upcoming Interior Design Show (Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Jan. 2124), 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 micro-custom maker. From their tiny Distillery District studio ( lightmaker studio.com), Murphy and her husband/creative partner, Michael Stamler, produce original designs with a vaguely midcentury 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, actually builds the company’s products, and Murphy handles the business side, the designs themselves are often very collaborative. Also, because their pieces are produced one at a time often to order, there’s plenty of opportunity to tailor it to a client’s individual 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 or imitators. “Often we find when midcentury designs are revived, it can look contrived,” she notes, “so we don’t adhere strictly to the style.”
Instead, they start with mid- 20th- century- inspired icons, such as natural or geometric shapes — spheres, cones, cylinders — and combine them in simple, visually rhythmic ways. Even a semiabstract design like Branch, a series of short tubes that branch out in a fan much like, well, a tree branch, are based on repeating lengths of pipe in two sizes, set in exact 45-degree angles.
Chandelier prices range from $1,000 to $3,000; table lamps from $200 to $500.
“Finding and sourcing bulbs is often a challenge,” says Stamler, especially since they are often an in- tegral part of the design. To illustrate, he shows a rather endearing little table lamp featuring a round bulb with LED filaments arrayed in a flurry of parallel lines, radiating from the bulb’s base like cartoony sound waves. The style is called Shout.
Originally, almost all t he c ompany’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 to go along with what have become, relatively speaking, bestsellers. Some of the styles have unabash- edly personal names, like Betty ( after Murphy’s mother), whereas others are more figurative: Atom is a stylized molecule, Stella has a slight constellation feeling.
“We want to make beautiful lighting; that’s more important than being able to expand on a global scale,” Murphy says. “There’s a lot of pride in what we do.”