What’s your favorite use for the ubiquitous fluorescent bulb? If I’m going to be completely honest, I’d have to say I’m partial to employing the four foot tubes of glass in a scene by scene reenactment of the Darth Vader/Obi Wan Kenobi fight scene from Star Wars. If any male readers out there who lived through the 70s haven’t actually indulged this juvenile impulse, I’m sure they’ve imagined it. As satisfying as it may be to occasionally smash those bulbs, designer Taylor Levy of CW&T has re-contextualized fluorescents to the extent that we’ll forget all about lightsabers and actually begin to appreciate the item for its unwavering aesthetic potential.

Circle Hook Light. Designed by Taylor Levy.

A Place to Hang your Light

Actually, Levy’s work with Circle Hook Light represents a two-pronged innovation. The piece’s aesthetic prowess is found in its inversion of traditional bathroom or kitchen figures, which, as manufacturer CW&T helpfully points out, “are hard to reach, annoying to maintain and often conceal the bulb itself.” Levy’s CHT does away with the obfuscating shade—which, in spite of the designer’s characterization as “the ones that look like boobs”—are invariably unattractive and not un-frequently coated with an impenetrable film of grease and bugs. The result is that the bulb itself becomes the fixture—a soft, glowing nimbus of light that evokes the dream of a benevolent haloed personage.

Before we ask what that Angel is doing on the wall, however, we should examine the functional ramifications of Circle Hook Light. Because, quite apropos of its name, this fixture hums into radiant life not by flipping a switch or punching a dimmer, but by manually suspending it atop Levy’s bold brass rectangular fixture. The power junction is a spring loaded mechanism. When the prongs of the bulb find home, they depress the inlet in the fixture receptacle, thus closing the circuit and imparting the sweet life of light to the darkly encroaching night.

Via CoolHunting.