| Low Maintainence |
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When Jeremy Cole, a London designer, was last interviewed in this section, he had just introduced a gold version of his Aloe lamps.
"Love it, we’ll take two!" was not this reporter’s first reaction. His new lamp, the Cymbidium, is a ceramic orchid suspended inside a 23 inch glass cylinder. It is to be introduced in August at Property, in SoHo, where it will sell for $1,950, making it a relative bargain. What happened, he was asked in a cozy long-distance chat. Couldn’t he move the gold? "The gold sells, trust me," Mr. Cole said. "It actually created other problems in terms of gold prices, but it moves all the time. Even in places like Denmark. The Scandinavian Nordic has always been about neutral white interiors. It’s a great piece in my collections." Mr. Cole’s inspiration for the orchid lamp was, if you can believe it, orchids. He always had a few in his studio, he said, although he never managed to keep them alive for very long. To make the fragile-looking porcelain flower for his lamp, which is lighted from the base, he created his own ceramic compound, mixing recycled porcelain from botched lamps ("you’d call them seconds," he said) with nylon. The flower, which hangs by its stem inside the open glass cylinder, is actually quite tough, Mr. Cole said. To dust the lamp, you just remove the orchid by its stem and wipe out the cylinder. The orchid, he said, can be vacuumed or swished in water. |