A Five-Headed Chandelier

I think we can all agree that hearty thanks are owed to retailer Italian Design and showroom manager Alfredo Perez, who, from their home base of Brookline, MA, is a reliable stateside source of all manner of great overseas finds: "The showroom features furnishings and lighting from some of the world’s leading brands-Dema, Flos, Artemide, Verardo, and Lago, Italy’s premier supplier of most innovative products."

Five Palms. Designed by Ayala Serfaty for Aqua Creations.

Though I.D. stocks products of every stripe, from my vantage they're making a name for themselves as purveyors of innovative lighting concepts. First we saw the crystalline rain of the Murano Due Ether Chandelier; now comes the sensuous serpentine gyrations of the Five Palms Suspension Lamp, designed by Israel's very own Ayala Serfaty.

A Five-Headed Chandelier

An intriguing duo of crushed silk wrapped on metal, Five Palms descends from the ceiling via a central arm, then sprouts into a spidering network of no less than five tendrils, or branches, or tentacles (choose your organic metaphor), each of which terminates in an eco-wise CFL shrouded in a cloud of bulbous fabric, just like the ivory bloom on the season's first peonies. Five Palms is available in a versatile palette of nine shades of shade (cream, smoke, sky, grass, dark, flame, gold, red, and orange), any of which are fully detachable; so should the urge strike for an alteration to the ambience, Five Palms has you covered.

Designer Serfaty (seen previously on 3rings with her Anana Chair) has earned international acclaim for her slightly surreal if organically-invested pieces: "known for the merging of art and design,” her works have been displayed in major museums world-wide, among them the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the Cooper-Hewitt in New York. These venerable institutions had best clear some space for Five Palms-with its Medusa-headed asymmetry, its artful infusion of fabric and metal, and its slightly sinister intimation of an other-worldly locomotion, Five Palms will certainly turn the heads of artists and designers alike.

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