I was delighted to be invited to the Salon del Mobile this year by the Italian Trade Agency. It is the first time I have been back for over 10 years. The excellent hospitality included travel, hotel and access to the VIP lounge that is at the opposite end of the fair ground to the Euroluce halls. This has had the effect of me massively surpassing my 10,000 steps each day of the fair.
First some overall impressions. The first and most significant thing was that they had switched off all the hall lighting in the Euroluce halls allowing each exhibitor's products to really show what they are doing. It is quite amazing that this is not done for every lighting exhibition, sometimes trying to see what a product on a stand is actually doing is next to impossible. Overall the stand design was excellent and really quite lavish. There were a few stand out examples however Inverlight being one. This range of garden lights was displayed in a very believable desert garden setting with the lights themselves really showing the patterns they create and the delicacy possible in lighting small plants. This would have been a complete non event had the hall lights been switched on.
Another stand remarkable for its minimalism was Leucos comprising a few film lighting stands supporting the products and little else, an object lesson in creating a big impact with minimal resources.
Another stand design development that apparently has been copied from some of the furniture exhibitors was that many were fully enclosed and it was impossible to see any products from the aisles. Many of these created long queues of visitors as the stand staff restricted the flow. I feel that this was an attempt to make the manufacturer seem more exclusive in the same way that clubs like to have queues to enhance their desirability. Just like celebrities in clubs we had been given VIP badges so could waltz to the head of the line and get instant admission!
I must admit that I don’t like this approach at all. It certainly disrupts my typical pattern of exhibition visiting, that is walking reasonably briskly around the exhibition up and down each aisle stopping when something interesting catches my eye or I see someone I know on a stand. Basically all these closed stands were ignored on my first pass through the exhibition being visited one by one on the second day, well the ones I knew were worth taking time for.
I am always on the look out for original or unique thing, but also trying to figure out what is “in fashion” at the moment. It used to be that some manufacturer would show something different and the following year there would be many copies and minor variations by others. Well last year in Frankfurt there was nothing spectacularly innovative, leastwise nothing that caught my attention. In Euroluce there were two fashion strands that did attract my notice. The first one was glowing cables. Not so much the ever present LED rope light but illuminated cable suspending a light fitting. These were shown by low budget suppliers like Osram (Ledvance) as quite simple solutions and very highly and quirkily finished by Flos one of the manufacturers hiding their wares behind walls and queues!
The other fashion item was the light in or on glass tubes. These were everywhere and carried out with varying elegance and cleverness. I was glad to see Ingo Mauer heading the clever end with their offering alongside a number of their usual quirky offerings that included some nice china and even their own branded lamps that really mimic a frosted incandescent lamp remarkably well.
Davide Groppi, another closed shop, had some very elegant glass tubes, in reality solid glass rods that looked wonderful from the right angle, however were little more than an LED tape stuck to the back! So use these with care only in places where you can’t see the trick! Groppi did have a few other quite beautiful things with much more magic to the placement of light sources that absolutely conceal them. Also they showed a completely bonkers wall light composed of Scalextric track with colour leds stuck on it. Seeing things like this allows you to appreciate the real cleverness, inventiveness and humour of Ingo Mauer’s designers even since they lost their leader.
Exhibitions are about discovering new things. They are also about stamina. I discovered Ginseng coffee, fortunately on the first day quite early on! This is something new to me but certainly helped maintain the necessary energy levels.
I also attended two design led discussion panels, in the “architect designed” arena. Unfortunately, the architect had raised concept and appearance above ergonomics to the extent that the seating was impossibly uncomfortable so much so that it made it difficult to pay full attention even to Karu Mende’s thankfully (for my backside) quite short presentation!
So what was the stand out product for me? The Matthews family's Lucifer lighting have been producing technically excellent downlights for many decades. They have branched out into a more decorative focussed but still functional family fittings. Previewed with a small externally designed ceiling fitting at Frankfurt last year they have designed, in house, an extremely elegant large ceiling and pendant light maximising the effect of a glass involute bowl. It is a fitting that could be used in almost any setting, corporate, hospitality and even residential. In an exhibition filled with glittering finely made objects the subtlety and effectiveness of this family of lights was really exceptional playing to the full strengths of the form and materiality of the glass.
Here are a few more of the many lights in tubes that caught my eye. Lets see what Frankfurt brings next year!
