U.K.’s Lights&Lamps Lights up the U.S. Market
Welcome to 2023 and welcome to Lights&Lamps! If you haven’t yet heard of this rapidly growing brand, that’s because they established themselves across the pond in 2020—only at the tail end of 2022 have they become available to the U.S. market.
Detail of Alia Chandelier by Lights&Lamps.
Founded by Niki Wright and Scarlet Hampton, Lights&Lamps departs from the usual paradigm of lighting brands via the principals’ expertise with materials. Wright and Hampton boast 25 years combined experience in designing and developing lighting and interiors for the British high street. As designers, they’re immersed in texture and tone, color and touch, sights and sounds, and the myriad qualities of the designed environment.
Circo Lamp.
The upshot is the tremendous variety of designs they offer. And these many styles are grouped not around type of light but around material. Without taking too deep a dive into their inventory, one discerns glass, graphite, concrete, brass, marble, porcelain, and rattan. Lots and lots of rattan.
Miata table lamp with charcoal concrete and rattan.
The above onlly hints at the incredible diversity offered and the endlessly creative ways in which disparate materials are combined. The concrete and rattan Miata proposes a curious symbiosis of materials that ordinarily would have nothing to do with each other, making for a compelling interplay of East and West, ancient and contemporary, sensuous unpredictable curves and timeless elegance.
Maybe that’s a lot of baggage to put upon a rather simple table lamp, but it provides an instructive example of how the emphasis on combining materials results in inspired and continually surprising designs. To get a sense of the brand’s breadth, here’s Lina.
Lights & Lamps Lina Chandelier.
If Miata offers a compelling interplay of disparate styles, Lina is firmly grounded in time and place, as in 17th century France. “We are constantly inspired by fellow lighting designers of the past,” say the founders, and Lina demonstrates this to be true with an exacting period reconstruction piece, “adorned with crystal glass beads and drops and finished in antique brass.”
Lina Detail.
And here’s Ridotti, a synthesis of hand-woven raffia and burnished brass with a transparent bubble glass globe.
Ridotti Pendant.
If the different materials provoke a kind of mental time travel, this one takes you back to the 70s, with an eclectic retro vibe that’s also extraordinarily well put-together, much more so than all those wicker-like hats and baskets from the same era.
Ridotti Detail.
Part of the genius of Lights&Lamps is the way they make these disparate possibilities available in one place and often at an accessible price point. The brand’s website goes a long way to accomplishing this, serving as an easy-to-navigate online hub: “the very first time Wright and Hampton’s innovative designs are available direct to homeowners and designers, making it a very exciting announcement for the US lighting market.”
Imperial 3 light brass and opal pendant: “It’s all about the glass, at every angle, and you can see why.”
Of course, all of the above is important, but the primary motivator for Lights&Lamps is customer service. These are high-quality designs that clients will enjoy for years, if not generations, and Wright and Hampton pride themselves on this curatorial quality: “when you open that box and then switch it on, your new light or your new lamp has been designed by us and created for you.”
Get further details and peruse the inventory at Lights&Lamps.
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