Our good friends Trent and Kate from Dunoon commissioned a hanging lamp for the hallway of their wooden-farmer's-cottage home. Trading rough CAD models and sketches we found that a double-ended-spire best matched the Art Deco design styling of the Chrysler building. Designing the lamp took approximately a month and construction was a steady progress over 9 months.

A testimonial from Trent & Kate...

When we started our collaboration with Steve, we had only a vague idea for a lamp or shade of some kind. Our house is an original old high-ceilinged wooden farmer's cottage, probably from the 1930s. We wanted an elegant, simple piece that fitted the era of the house and matched the tall spaces available.

We started by talking a lot about art deco styling cues and representations of sunrise in general. Steve understood our concept straight away, and showed us how to relate our ideas to practical lead light designs that we all liked. Soon after we settled on the Chrysler building as a specific inspiration, and Steve managed to adapt the curves and shards from it's distinctive spire into a unique and beautiful piece of Art.

Since we installed the piece it just gets better every day. Every time I pass the lamp I see some new, exquisite detail of the design, the glass, the interaction with the hallway. It is beautifully in proportion with it's tall, narrow space, and it has immediately changed a walk-through part of our house into a show piece.

During the day, the sharp contrasts between the broad white faces and defined lead lines are visually arresting. The red shards create dark highlights that frame the stepped, architectural profile. When lit in the evening, the red pops out brightly and the white is almost luminous, bringing out a lovely oil-on-water texture in the milky glass pigment. A small, warm, spherical bulb shines as a little amber sun through the tear drop formation, and paints soft yellow candle flames on the near walls of the hallway.

I have discovered that if I sit in our darkened lounge room at night, a glass picture frame shows a perfect reflection of our lamp, glowing softly. And of course the light is perfectly framed in the window above our front door, prominent from our front gate and even the road outside. Soon our house will be a local landmark by night!

Thank you Steve, we couldn't have even imagined a piece like this without you.

Trent & Kate,
30th November 2014