Pelle’s New York Design Week Installation Brings the Drama

For sheer bonkers drama, our New York Design Week pick today is Unnatural Habitat by Pelle, a showroom installation of new work that includes a lighting system meant to resemble both floating dust particles and a shattered mirror as well as a giant, hand-sculpted banana frond turned pendant light. (The new pieces are staged among billowing, floor-to-ceiling cream-colored curtains for good measure.) Pelle describe the intent of their collection as trying to depict “natural phenomena with abstract means,” where objects are “defamiliarized through shifts in proportion, context, material and time.” We like the whole thing — including a crisp table milled from solid blocks of aluminum — but really we’re here for that painted banana leaf, which will turn your living room into a jungle affair, no watering needed.