Giopato & Coombes has searched for the perfect glass, creating artisanal high quality products with a refined technique
Giopato & Coombes are a design duo, two designers “involved with doing”. Cristina Giopato and Christopher Coombes are an architect and a designer, italian and british. Working together they have created a multidisciplinary team, which is the base of their creative fuel. Different views on the world, different personalities, that when mixed make projects of extraordinary beauty, recognized internationally.
Two artistic personalities decisively interesting and with a strong creative mind. Answering the question “what do you like the most about being a designer?” she says “I like the combination of an instinctive/intuitive/irrational approach of the creative act and the necessary pragmatism because a project turns into an industrial product. it’s a constant precarious balance.” He says: “Aside from fighting with my wife? I like the path to concreteness. It is unfortunately not linear, but is based on so many small decisions between thousands of ideas and thoughts. I like to force the mind to build the work the best way it can, to combine benefits across all project elements, eliminating a sense of design stratification.”
It is from their differences when creating and working that are born some of the products that have become famous all over the world, bringing them to collaborate with names like Kenzo, Design Within Reach, Fiam Italia, Living Divani and many others.
One of their most famous creations are “I Flauti”, which are lamps in Murano glass, positioned in a subtle line that divides past and future. Reminding us of the beauty of antique lamps, the shapes of the “flutes” are extraordinarily modern, uniting a secular tradition with contemporary technology. Speaking of the experience that has brought to the creation of this product, the designer says: “Arriving in Murano via boat, docking in Fondamenta dei Vetrai and start to wander from one street to the other, searching for the right “blow”, which was aligned with the project we had in our bags. The colors of the houses, the colors of the sky of the first day of sun after so much rain, the warmth of the people, first a bit dodgy and then very generous; the call to my origins, the memories of old and modern glass that have accompanied me from my childhood. Then meeting the right people, and exchanging ideas between designer and master glassmaker."
A meticulous work, based on the research of the perfect blow that could give life to a project that was, until then, only in their imagination, this is the modus operandi of the couple of architects.
Every lamp is is made by hand with high quality and artisanal procedures. The taste of the city of Venice, through the hands of the artisans of Murano, comes to life in this lamp, with colors that recall the sunset on the lagoon. The LED light positioned on the inside of the lamp is deliberately studied to illuminate both upwards and downwards; this particular strategy brings out the work of the glass that surrounds the lamp, making it the center of the product.
Another extraordinary creation from the duo Giopato e Coombes is the series of lamps “Bolle”. In this creation we can find bubbles of blown glass with a light inside of them. The metaphors of the lightness of the light results evident and well articulated in this series of lamps with a magic and mysterious taste.
The architect tells us how the idea of this lamp was born: “For a few seconds, before our eyes, we were surrounded by a multitude of soap bubbles. It was a magical moment and their formal simplicity was beautiful and immediate: we had wanted to crystallize this moment, when the bubbles grow more and more until they touch and then they explode! This was the starting point. The lightness of the soap bubbles became for us a metaphor of the inconsistency of the light.”
This project marks the continuity of the research on glass work, which started with the “i Flauti” series. Bolle is also made by Venetian artisan masters who use the “lume” technique, which allows glass balls to be mounted one on top of the other. The interior LED light, placed on a specially designed brass stand, creates a soft light that not only illuminates the room, but it highlights the characteristics of the glass, which turns into the protagonist of the project.