Cool Hunting

The lights at 100% Design this year were big, beautiful, complex and dramatic. The overriding theme was the reinvention of the chandelier as a format to explore the interaction between form, texture and light on a large scale. Here are three of our favorites.

Central St. Martins graduate Winnie Lui wowed the crowds with "White," her amazing chandelier of collected objects. Trained as a jewelery designer Lui has applied her love of detailed form and texture to lighting design. In collaboration with U.K. lighting company Innermost, she will produce 50 white and 50 black chandeliers, all from objects she has been collecting for many years. Lui says for her it's an exercise in composition and she loves contrasting textures and reflections by placing different objects next to each other. Essential to her design work is celebrating the inherent beauty of everyday objects.

Christopher LaBrooy's giant Felt Chandelier, also in production with Innermost, floated delicately, like a large jellyfish, above the heads of those browsing through the 100% Design bookstore. We love this exploration of form using the looping strips of felt to make sinuous patterns around the light, like a doodle drawing.

We could hardly miss Dominic Bromley's Shoal light which at two meters tall and 1.5 meters in diameter was surely the largest light on show this week. For all its enormity, however, Shoal still manages to be beautifully delicate with hundreds of small, finely cast, bone china fish swimming around the central light source. Bromley works as a sculptor and lighting designer in the U.K. under his own label Scabetti.