IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS, a Firozabad chande-lier in your drawing room spoke a lot more than just your social status; it also meant that you could afford the hefty electricity bills. But these sparklers are no longer cool in these modern times of shrunk living spaces and low ceilings. Nor are those over-the-top decorative wall sconces—the homedécorstatementof the’80sand’90s—consid-ered fashionable anymore.People like Aamir Khan now want an Atul Johri paper “installation” to light up their homes. Theactorrecently purchasedallthesix available styles by the designer from Good Earth’s store in Mumbai. For his river-front house in Goa, hotelier Arjun Sharma did not rope in lights and interiors expert Alex Davis just toplanhisspace. Hewantedspecificideas for the light fixtures for his fashionable home.The textured acrylic and dried elephant ear leaf lights, created by Goa-based designers Sonia Weder andThomas Schnieder, proved effective.The correlation between the explosion of steely high-rises and people’s changing tastes has never been so apparent. The well-heeled today are increasingly avoiding fussy interiors and go-ing in for the pared-down look. And a band of homegrown designers are showing the way how light and shade can conspire to sex up a home.If designer Vibhor Sogani’s wood-and-steel light fixtures want to achieve a smooth Calvin Klein-like exterior finish, Mukul Goyal’s luxe light wants even the inside of the lamp to look as “good as the outside of a Mercedes Benz”. A graduate in metallurgy from IIT Kanpur, Goyal went on to pursue product design at NID, Ahmedabad,and attendedDomusAcademyin Milan. He today experiments with a range of materialslikeglass, metalandplastic.Combin-ing modern design and the artistry of ordinarily found objects like an iron sieve and bhopu (trum-pet), he creates high-end goods for stores in the US. Healsosupplies toNextinDelhi. Goyal,whohasset up a four-storey factory in Gurgaon, plays with fantasy. ‘Caterpillar’, his flagship metal and plastic manoeuvreable task light, took nearly three years to make.“There is always a tendency to ideate from transmuted forms of inspiration as well as create something new out of easily available ob-jects,” he says.Alex Davis runs Indi Store in New Delhi’s Shapur Jat area.The product designer and ex-roommate of Goyal at NID began by making rudimentary furni-ture designs in 1996 when he discovered that the shavings of pinewood, a common packaging mate-rial, had a “soothing honey-toned colour”. His ex-periments resulted in the starkly beautiful‘Cocoon’ series, which throws off dramatic spiral shades. Very few have the gumption to turn down an in-ternationally renowned designer likeTerence Con-ran.AtulJohri,aBangalore-baseddesigner,whohas pioneered the collapsible paper lamp, did. “He wanted my designs but not my logo,” says the man who has Bollywood stars as his clients. Johri started making lamps out of banana pulp paper while at-tending a workshop at Jaipur’s Kumarappa Paper Research Institute a decade ago.If Johri’s geometrical lights are feted for creating exciting architectural spaces, Jenny Pinto’s designs are environment-friendly. After chucking her job as anad filmproducerinMumbai, PintomovedtoBan-galore in themid’90s.She setupamud-brickstudio to produce hand-made paper out of mulberry bark, bananapulp, river grassandpineapplefibre.Most of these designers also do customised de-sign for their clients. The demand for them is rising. Clearly, the light revolution is here to stay.
