Form Us With Love | “Lace Metal” lamp

in Lighting by editor — 7:58 am | May 19, 20120 comments

During the Salone del Mobile, Swedish design studio Form Us With Love launched the “Lace Metal” lamp, the studio’s first collaboration with Italian design icon Cappellini.The idea behind the Lace metal lamp came up while visiting a Swedish metal working industry called Häfla Bruk – one of Sweden’s oldest companies, established in 1682.“When we visited Häfla, they had just invented a new technique of manufacturing expanded metal with gradient sized holes. This struck us as something very poetic, resembling textile or lace.

We immediately felt that we wanted to make a lamp with this material, it has great characteristics for a lampshade. We always wanted to work with expanded metal since it’s so rational, there is nothing going to waste when produced, the holes are made by puncturing and stretching the metal”, says Form Us With Love. The result is a lamp made out of metal but that has a look of lightness and fragility. The gradient holes spreads the light in an atmospheric, almost etheral way. Founded by Enrico Cappellini in 1946, Cappellini is now owned by the Poltrona Frau group since 2005, but Enrico’s son Giulio is still the creative backbone of the operation, based in Milan. He first saw Form Us With Love’s work in the studio’s native Stockholm.

“I met them some years ago in Stockholm. I went to see a presentation during the fair in Stockholm and I was fascinated by their projects,” says Cappellini. Now this fascination has grown into a collaboration and Form Us With Love’s first project for the Italian company. “Form Us With Love truly represents the Cappellini philosophy of respect and sensitivity to materials and an elegant design language,” says Cappellini. “It’s simple but never boring.”