We exist in light. Light serves a vital need, but we also crave its emotionality. Light makes the world visible and affects us in ways far beyond granting us sight—offering moments of encouragement or spiritual insight, invigorating the body and mind, or altering the ambiance in an unexpected, welcome way.
Light’s intangible effects are the fascination of designers Cristiana Giopato and Christopher Coombes, who started their namesake lighting company in Italy in 2006. The two designers both studied industrial design, Giopato at the Politecnico di Milano (prior to finishing her architecture degree in Venice in 2012), and Coombes at Brunel University in London. Before founding Giopato & Coombes, Giopato held internships with Makio Hasuike and Patricia Urquoila, and Coombes worked for George Sowden and Sebastian Bergne. Bringing their expertise together, they formed a company that braids generations-old traditions with advanced technology to make light’s ephemerality even more evocative.
“Light is the surprise of the immaterial,” they note when describing their work, born from a creative practice they call the Supernatural Daydream: “an experience that begins with our everyday and goes beyond boundaries.” Several of the company’s collections were conceived through surprises experienced on walks, as the pair ambled across cities like Venice and Seoul and through mist fields and airborne soap bubbles. These sensory encounters are brought back to the studio where they’re met with rigorous technological and fabrication methods. “We started by giving full freedom to material experimentation,” they explain, “combining cutting-edge lighting technology and rational research.”
Their new Bruma collection premiered as a site-specific installation titled A Thousand Landscapes, first shown at this year’s Salone del Mobile followed by exhibitions at NYCxDESIGN and 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen. Bruma chandeliers are made of handmade laminar glass modules suspended at different heights. The designers experimented with wax and isomalt, a sugar that looks like handblown glass, to achieve a texture called “pulegoso, recalling a unique Muranese artisanal technique that creates a myriad of little spotty bubbles (‘puleghe’) inside the glass matter, when worked by hand. The effect evokes the soft muffled reflection on the water on a foggy day.”
“The Bruma collection is a balance between density and absence,” they write, “like an echo of the impalpable presence of the mist and how we interact with it. A silent sculpture of light.”
Bruma draws on other beloved collections, like the spherical Bolle, Cirque’s pirouetting lines, Gem’s starbursts, Softspot’s minimal coin-shaped sconces, and Flauti’s gemlike lanterns made of Murano glass. Each collection is its own poem, composed of particular motifs and rhythms distilled into various configurations.
The Maehwa line, named for the Korean plum blossom, is a material lyric made in response to a moment the designers experienced in Seoul, when people of all ages “were turning their heads up to gaze at the plum blossoms, with their open corolla or with small spherical buds still closed, waiting for them to vibrate in the breeze.” Like the remembered blossom display, the Maehwa light fixtures introduce into the interior a swarm of soft orbs dotting freely-formed, branchlike bronze tubing.
In these initial experiences and the creative labor that follows, Giopato & Coombes write, “we perceive an inner calm, born from a pure connection with nature.” Giopato & Coombes’ dreamlike pieces will soon be arriving in Colorado, available to view and purchase this fall at our highly anticipated Aspen showroom.
