Emily Group of Thirteen high gloss black

Emily is a series of gorgeous lamps with shades that are handmade of sheet steel. She is spray painted in a semi-matte or in a high gloss finish.
In the glossy version the metal is painted in up to 10 layers - similar to a process used for high end pianos - which creates an extraordinarily deep, high gloss black finish. This also means you can polish off scratches with standard car polish unless they didn‘t break the primer. Emily is covered with frosted plexiglass for a beautiful, diffuse illumination of the light, no matter which bulb you use. A central aspect of the design is to achieve a long life-span based on the use of materials that age gracefully. Besides the single pendants, several groups with a frame made of solid oak wood underline Emily ́s special character.

The Emily Series won the German Design Award 2019.

Concept

The source of inspiration for Emily is a work by Andreas Gursky. In his series »James Bond Islands« he shows a digitally arranged group of islands in Thailand that seem to float in the ocean, although they are in fact only the tips of mountains, of course. The shape of these islands is quite heterogenous, however all of them form a family which is connected through their organic, in a way pyramidal shape. Through a distance the ocean seems to be a perfectly flat surface that »cuts« these shapes on the bottom. The idea was to lift these islands out of the ocean, creating lampshades that float in a space/room. If they would hang on the same height it should be possible to create the vague impression of a mountain landscape that loses touch to the ground.
There was no other option to realise that idea than building these shapes out of metal, an obvious choice for pendant lamps with a long tradition due to its solidity and the beautiful aging qualities. This turned out to be a difficult task to realize in small scale as one usually needs large and very expensive pressing or deep drawing tools to manufacture such shapes. The solution was to look deeper into the manufacturing of free from metal parts in the way the car industry produced 70- 100 years ago. In the end, the metal shades are cut, bent, formed, welded and sanded by hand in a complex process to build those natural, organic shapes.