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With well over 30 years of design ideation, innovation and experience under their belt, Italian creative agency Hangar Design Group continues to look toward an ever-evolving frontier. Driven by instincts to travel and to create, the…

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Clerkenwell Design Week 2013: orange glass shades sit on concrete bases to form these chalice-shaped lamps by London designer Magnus Pettersen.

The Leimu lamps have tapered concrete bottoms that continue upward as glass. A bulb is placed at the top of this stem so light emanates thought the bowl above.

Finnish glass company Iittala will release two sizes of Pettersen‘s lights in September this year. The lamps were on show during Clerkenwell Design Week, where lights made of cable ties and felt cocoons were also exhibited.

Last year Pettersen contributed a side table from his Locker furniture range to the Stepney Green Design Collection curated by Dezeen, and has also designed a set of concrete stationery.

Other lamps we’ve recently featured include terracotta pots with conical shades and lights based on glass vats found in a milking parlour.

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See all our coverage of Clerkenwell Design Week 2013 »
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The following text is by Iitalla:

Iittala is proud to debut Leimu, a new lighting piece by young Norwegian-born designer, Magnus Pettersen. As its flame-evoking name suggests, the copper-brown Leimu creates a relaxed atmosphere for enjoyable moments in good company. With its strong concrete base, the impressive glass lamp portion, inspired by traditional lampshades, makes Leimu a brand-new lighting fixture where sensitivity encounters strength.

Concrete is a captivating material for Pettersen: “It has a raw and cold feel to it. The union of glass and concrete is well known in architecture, but it isn’t necessarily always beautiful. I wanted to smoothly combine opposites in a lamp and show that fierce and sensitive, cold and warm can work well together.”

Contrast fascinates Pettersen, whose studio is based in London. His style is referred to as “industrial luxury” because opposites are a recurring feature in his work. He looks at how well different materials or colours merge in an interesting and functional way without prejudice.

From a technical standpoint, harmonising the stem and glass portion was not easy. “Glass is a great material, but it is also very challenging because it is alive and it makes accurate dimensioning very difficult. However, through the know-how of and good communication with Iittala’s glass factory, we were able to combine concrete and glass into an elegant whole.”

Magnus Pettersen Studio is a design studio creating furniture, lighting and home acces-sories. Norwegian Magnus has studied design at Kingston University and Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design.

He has worked as a product designer for various studios and clients in London. Mag-nus Pettersen Studio was set up in 2010, launching its first product, the Concrete Desk Set in April 2011. Since then the studio has developed a range of pieces of which some are being launched under the umbrella of internationally acclaimed brands and others being developed in-house.

The post Leimu lamps by Magnus Pettersen
for Iittala appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: instead of serving up “mundane and predictable” cliches, the world of luxury design should be tempting us with things we never knew we wanted, argues Sam Jacob in his latest column.

For some, the relentless tyranny of luxury rolls on from business class lounge to hotel lobby via restaurant interior and beachside condo. A continuous experience of glistening surfaces, with the spaces in between plugged with walnut-dashed limos.

These are the weird scenes inside the goldmine of a world that never stops lustering, glistening and shimmering. A world made up of a continuous interior space polished entirely smooth. Each hermetic bubble annexed to another equally high spec bubble. Exterior-less, with no threshold to the un-luxe world the rest of us live in.

This is the world described in the Robb Report, the self proclaimed “global luxury resource”, which has just released what it calls its 2013 Luxury Portfolio. To the copywriters of Robb, it’s probably supposed to summon up sheaves of investment certificates slotted into a leather-bound folder with gold embossed lettering, lying on the smooth surface of an executive desk somewhere with a W1 postcode – but to those of us who went to art school it sounds more like a plush way to carry your A1 sheets.

If we are to believe that a Robb Report world actually exists, it might like to read an edit of American Psycho containing extended descriptions of embossed Silian Rail on business cards. Or Fifty Shades of Grey minus the sex, with page after page in which Anastasia goes wild over the technical specifications of Christian’s latest gift…

Your Christophe Claret Soprano watch chimes its divine four cathedral gong sound, cutting across the vivid, natural sound that remains remarkably stable throughout any listening space emanating from your Steinway Lyngdorf Model LS Concert speakers. You tap your Santoni footwear to the beat, the distinctive features of the shoe unchanged by the passage of time, still emanating the same luxury, design, and perfection as before.

The topnote of Chanel 1932 wafts into the room, and, as you recall that it is the latest addition to the Chanel Les Exclusifs family, you remember too the Louis Vuitton Paris Vendôme store, which truly represents the essence of luxury and sophistication with its mesmerising and innovatively designed interiors exuding opulence. Your Vertu Ti rings and as you pick it up you can’t help but note its high-end features and urbane look and feel. “Hello?” It’s the Amanzoe, a 38-suite resort whose peaceful and luxurious surroundings offer avid travellers like you an ideal environment to explore natural beauty, coastal pleasure and the ancient heritage of the Peloponnese region. Blah, blah, blah…

The Robb Report is, of course, not really a world at all. It’s a lump of inert media made out of mechanically recovered press releases perfectly designed for media sales. Nevertheless, it does corral a world of global luxury between its covers. A world over whose surface a particular idea of design is poured like a lacquer.

International luxury is a language spoken by high-end brands as a kind of design patois. But for all its apparent sophistication and refinement, it’s a language of primitive grunts that can only parrot back cliches of exclusivity. Though it tries to speak to us as though it were looking each one of us deep in the eye, it can only bark at us all in generalities. It’s a language of design spoken by corporate monoliths totally devoid of humanity that can only conceive of the most base and generic of value systems.

Surely the whole point of luxury brands, sitting as they do at the apogee of capitalist consumerism, is the creation of value? Instead, they rely on things – often on substances themselves, as well as signs and symbols – that already have value. There’s no fun, no risk and no imagination in that. Surely the role of luxury design is to make us want what we never imagined we wanted, not what we always knew we wanted? If this is the place where our wildest dreams are supposed to take material form, it seems depressing that these dreams are so mundane and predictable.

The real role of luxury brands is not moral – luxury will always deal in excess and over-abundance – but philosophical. After all, isn’t philosophy itself a form of luxury? Luxury design is the space in which we should explore the very question of what constitutes contemporary luxury. It’s the place we might imagine the possibilities of 21st century luxuriousness, to invent new ways of being, feeling and making deluxe.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

Top image is from Shutterstock.

The post “There’s no fun, no risk and no imagination
in luxury design” appeared first on Dezeen.

The makers of highly functional, modular bags for everyday use and extended travel, Stockholm’s Unit Portables are celebrating their their second year of superlative bag design by teaming up with Berlin-based clothing brand recordOutboundLink(this,…

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Découverte de Snöbär : un meuble inspiré par la plante Symphoricarpos, aussi appelée Snowberry en anglais. Réalisé par Yonder Magnetik, ce fauteuil en chêne propose à la fois un design élégant et sympathique mais aussi un maximum de confort. A découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.