Designer Omer Arbel`s Light-Bulb Moment - WSJ

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Designer Omer Arbel's Light-Bulb Moment
The Canadian designer experiments with bespoke lighting for homes
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By JOANNE LEE-­YOUNG
March 27, 2014 8:39 p.m. ET
To fill a vertical space of more than 90 feet in the main hall of the Victoria and Albert
museum in London, Canadian designer Omer Arbel hung 280 handmade glass
spheres in different sizes and colors on a crazily twisted copper structure.
The striking chandelier, an installation at
the museum set to end in April, prompted
a Canadian entrepreneur to ask Mr. Arbel
for a bespoke piece for his home. Such a
commission costs at least $200,000 and
"more like $400,000," says the artist.
Mr. Arbel, 37 years old, is the co-­founder
of Vancouver-­based design and
View Slideshow
manufacturing company, Bocci. In 2005,
The 28-­series light, shown being hung by a Bocci
company employee in a stockroom in Vancouver. It
he started the company with
takes about an hour for three people to make one
entrepreneur Randy Bishop, and
fixture, says Mr. Arbel;; up to 15% of the bulbs break
during the process. Grant Harder for The Wall Street
launched his own design firm, Omer
Journal
Arbel Office. That same year, he made
his first piece of lighting: a solid cast glass orb with a seam and frosted space for a
light bulb. He named it the 14. "I name my pieces in chronological order," says Mr.
Arbel, who had previously designed a shelf called 1.1, a cast resin chair he named 2.4
and a concrete chair, 8.0. "It was the 14th piece I've ever designed," he said. Since
then, sales at Bocci have doubled every year.
Today, interior designers for hotel and retail companies such as the Ritz-­Carlton Hotel
Co., Tiffany TIF +1.50% & Co., the Shangri-­La Hotel Group, and Saks Fifth Avenue
use Mr. Arbel's pieces.
Demand for the 14 has been steady at Luminaire, the Chicago-­ and Miami-­based
contemporary furniture and lighting store started by Nasir and Nargis Kassamali in
1974. The retailer sells a single 14 orb for about $350, a canopy of 12 for $10,000 and
one with 36 bulbs for $17,000.
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"There's no downturn with these like we see with other pieces," says Ted Haaland, a
buyer at Luminaire.
2
After the commercial success of the 14, Mr. Arbel started experimenting with other
designs and production techniques, applying varying levels of heat to his molten glass,
pushing air through or taking it out of different materials.
He recently came up with plans for the piece commissioned by the Canadian
entrepreneur for his waterfront property in Vancouver. One idea: blow glass into giant
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sacks made from heat-­resistant fabric, clump together almost 30 of the resulting
translucent containers—some as tall as six feet—and put light bulbs in them.
“
'There's no downturn with these like we see with other
pieces,' says Ted Haaland, a buyer at Luminaire.
”
Another idea: fill a 30-­foot atrium connecting three floors with more than 200 black
glass pieces, each shaped like a cloud and painted with one-­way mirror coating. For
10 minutes at the end of the day, when the sunset is at its brightest, the glass will
"reflect that intense, natural light and be a celebration of it," says Mr. Arbel, who is
waiting to get a green light to start the project.
"Form comes from the way a material reacts," says Mr. Arbel. "We see what happens
and then we say 'What can we use this for?' A light? Yes, it's a light;; then we add in
the layers of practicality," like cables, switches and bulbs. Some results, he adds,
become limited "art pieces;;" others can be reproduced and sold in large numbers.
His experimentation with various materials used as molds led to the creation of the 21
light. It involves draping thin sheets of porcelain over a heat-­resistant, Plexiglass-­like
mold for a result that looks like a trumpet flower.
The 28 is a distorted sphere filled with cavities of varying shapes created by
manipulating air in the molten glass. One milky-­white cavity holds a low-­wattage bulb.
It takes an hour for three people to make one;; 10% to 15% of them break in the
process, says Mr. Arbel.
Mr. Arbel was born in Jerusalem and moved to Vancouver when he was 13. He says
he "made stuff all the time" as a kid and "picked up crafts very quickly." He was an
avid fencer, once ranked in the top 20 at the Junior World Championship. After
studying architecture in Canada, he apprenticed for Catalan architect Enric Mirrales in
Barcelona. He lived in New York, Toronto, Rome and Mexico City before returning to
Vancouver in 2000.
Today, on the fifth floor of an old printing building—and sometimes in a garage-­like
space in the parking lot below—his team of eight glass blowers and other artisans
make and fit glass pieces with small light bulbs so they are ready to use as simple
accents or as dramatic displays.
Interior designers dangle the orbs at different lengths so they look like floating
bubbles. Sometimes, a few are hung in a straight line over a long dining table or
displayed in a cluster like a giant bunch of grapes.
"There is a special quality in the air bubbles and inclusions that are an inherent
process of making the glass," says Torsten Schlauersbach, principal at New York-­
based Haute Architecture and protégé of British architect Norman Foster. He has used
Mr. Arbel's spheres in his country house and in residential projects. "The beauty is in
the simplicity. They are quite heavy, but float in space."
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