Our quest today for the natural, the hand-crafted and the original in our built environments is righting some of the wrongs we’ve inflicted on our land and seas with the mass production of products made from synthetic materials. It’s also exposing a contemporary yearning for warmth, comfort and poetry in our surroundings, not seen perhaps since the seventies slump – the last economic happening that opened design doors to bamboo and rattan, and cosseting ‘fat’ furniture.
Bringing warmth to lighting fixtures
Today’s craft revolution is reaching lighting. Typically, lighting is seen by contemporary architects as an extension of the building, further developing a structure’s personality through synergistic materials and form. Decorative lighting tends to belong in a different universe, but our need for the natural and the crafted in everything from our light fittings to the floors beneath our feet is changing that.
‘Every piece has been touched for many hours in its making,’ says the designer Jette Scheib, whose family of woven lights for Forestier, Grass and Parrot, occupy this new territory of designed craft. ‘It hasn’t just fallen out of a machine.’ Aesthetically it is out there, with punchy colours dyed into the braided fibres, so much so that at first Scheib questioned its potential success. ‘It’s totally decorative. They are statement pieces and you either love it or hate it,’ she says, crediting Forestier with an open-mindedness not typical of commercial brands. Many, however, seem to love it, given the speed at which Grass and Parrot pieces fly off the shelves.
Where design meets craft
Few do decorative like Forestier. The French lighting brand, which describes its work as a ‘meeting between poetry and craftsmanship’, has often championed natural materials and hand-making alongside the lack of uniformity that comes with both, even when it has pushed the brand’s head above the parapet in architectural circles. It has ensured success by pursuing this direction with designers of renown – from Arik Levy and Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance to Elise Fouin and Jette Scheib, professionals who know how to walk the line between popular industrial aesthetics and craft.
Elise Fouin’s latest lighting family for the brand, Nebulis, is a collaboration with the Cévennes-based manufacturer of non-woven silk, Sericyne. The latter is a young entrepreneurial company that has revived organic French silk production in an area once renowned for it. Sericyne has developed innovative methods of making non-woven silk by applying the silkworms to 2D and 3D moulds. With the light but strong translucent material, Fouin has sculpted terraced volumes to make sconces and pendants that resemble clouds. They are ephemeral in appearance but somehow also confident and solid in their forms. The Sericyne silk perfectly suits Fouin’s methods of working, bringing an old natural resource refreshingly into a new design ‘In each of my creations, I like to divert material to invent new constructive principles,’ she says.
Emotional dimension brought by honest materials and skilled hands
Grass and Parrot are similarly old clothes in unexpected forms: Scheib borrowed an industrial lamp shape from the 1950s – one that would typically have been produced in metal – and developed a way to reproduce it in braided abaca, inspired by African basketry. ‘It’s questioning the usual. Both are very cool, iconic things – African basketry and 1950s lamp designs,’ says the designer. ‘It’s going between the lines to open up a new box. It’s a new translation for old craftsmanship.’ They are handmade by a community of what Scheib describes as ‘happy people’ in comfortable conditions in the Philippines, all of which she sees as adding to the emotional, meditative quality of the design.
Today, when all manufacturers of home furniture and accessories want to attach the words natural and craft to their output, Forestier finds itself ahead of the game in making it viable. There is always a balance to be found in combining the inconsistency of some natural materials (in quality and quantity) and the time of making by hand – a large Grass and Parrot pendant takes a day to make – and the need precisely for consistency and quantity in larger orders, but this is a juggle Forestier has always considered worthwhile, in order to fulfil its mission to make contemporary statement lighting that is poetic.
