Lighting Designer Lukas Peet on Balancing the Sculptural and the Saleable

Lukas Peet's first commercially successful lighting design — and the one that brought him to our attention way back in 2011 — looked like diamond wedding band that had been stretched into a three-foot-long oval tube. An arch of shiny gold at the top, flowing into a glowing strip of LEDs nestled inside the contoured glass, his Rudi light was inspired by his father, a jeweler. That light's success was enough to convince Peet that lighting might be the most interesting path for him to follow in design, and with his fellow Vancouver-based creatives, Caine Heintzman and Matt Davis, Peet co-founded the commercial and residential lighting manufacturer and studio ANDlight.

02.18.21

Q+A

This Canadian Designer is Leading the Charge — No Pun Intended — to Prove Lighting Can Be Both Efficient and Beautiful

Caine Heintzman’s designs are among the most expressive produced by his company, ANDLight; you've surely seen his Vine light, which can only be described by the contemporary term "chonky," hanging in places like the Pieces Home in Kennebunk, Maine. But in fact, Heintzman's designs are typically inspired by hardy, everyday industrial objects. He designs in a modular way so that his products can exist singularly or be grouped and customized for various spaces and projects, and evolve far into the future.

07.31.19

Eye Candy

This Canadian Designer — Known for His Woodwork — Is Making the Most Epic Glass

When we posted our New York Design Week round-ups earlier this spring, there was one project we held for later because it was just. that. gorgeous. Amidst a sea of walnut, bronze, maple, and steel at Vancouver-based designer Jeff Martin's booth, we spied these craggy, colorful glass vessels, glinting under the lights of the Javits. Turns out, when we reached out to Martin for more information, that the process by which they're made — from the remnants of past projects — is as interesting as the way they look.

04.29.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

The New Frontier at Bellevue Arts Museum

When we were first introduced to the multi-talented photographer Charlie Schuck, a good three years ago, he was running the heart-stoppingly chic concept store Object in Seattle, at which he paired things like Masanori Oji trivets with pieces he commissioned from local studios like Iacoli & McAllister and Grain. It was the first, most beautifully executed sign that a larger narrative was galvanizing around Pacific Northwest designers — one that reaches its apex this month with a museum show Schuck has curated for the Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington.

03.25.15

Up and Coming

Jacqueline Klassen, Ceramicist

Jacqueline Klassen didn’t grow up around design; her father was a therapist and her mom a case management worker, and their family’s greatest joy was good food. She didn’t study it either; she holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and was often told, “Go to school! You’d be a great teacher!” But rather than teach, Klassen instead signed up for more classes herself — only this time it was a six-week course in ceramics. “I immediately was in love,” Klassen remembers. “I was always grasping for something that would be a good fit for me; I was trying to make something work, but I hadn’t yet found it.” Over the next year, she toyed with the idea of going to grad school for art history. But when she found herself in the studio, at the wheel more often than not, it became apparent that perhaps she should listen to her gut.

03.21.12

What They Bought

Jacob Gleeson of The Tent Shop

It would be easy to assume a lot about The Tent Shop, a new online store run by the Vancouver-based artist Jacob Gleeson — namely, that it might be in the business of selling tents. Or, with its deadpan write-ups and roster of vintage ephemera, amateur art, and back-catalog pieces by artist friends, that the shop might be some Canadian version of Partners & Spade, and Gleeson a hyper-aware collector engaging in an art-world prank, à la Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961). In fact, neither is quite true. The shop’s name stems from its planned incarnation in the physical world: Gleeson intends to purchase a heavy-duty canvas tent in which he can randomly host events around Vancouver. And as for Gleeson, though he did a stint at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art + Design, he tends to view his new venture through the lens of an anthropologist more so than an artist or even a shopkeeper. “I started with the intention of showing these things together as much as wanting to sell them,” he says. “I’m drawn to the individual objects but something about putting them next to each other makes them even more interesting to me, which is why I leave things up on the site even after they’ve sold. The record of an object’s existence has as much value to me as the object itself.”