Collaborative Design Story

I knew the clients from some other purchase they had made, and they asked me to offer a design solution for this recreation room. My first visit to their home on Squam Lake allowed me to see the space in person, get a sense of the scale, take measurements, and even hold lampshades in various positions to experiment with configurations. This snapshot will later be used to create the virtual model so that later on in this design process, the client can see a representation of what the finished piece might look like in its eventual home. In this case, some technical aspects need to be considered, around lighting requirements for pool tables. It turns out there is an entire book on the finer points of pool table essentials, which I was able to borrow from a friend who is a pool fanatic.

During the last three years, I have completed 4 of these steel-and-wood-lamsphade projects, and it seems to be a part of my creativity that is accelerating. So I have been doodling with drawing ideas and keeping a folder of these. So at my first meeting with the clients on this recreation room project, I showed them these drawings. I already had an intuition which one they would choose, and it turned out to be correct. The drawing on the lower right did go thru many subtle iterations, but you can still see the basic idea in the final piece.

I spent a lot of time refining the sketch that was chosen. The most basic change was reversing the orientation for most of the horizontal arcs. But nudging the curvatures and ranges for the various elements was important. It is amazing how the smallest change can really throw the balance and flow totally out of whack. During this time I was also working with the steel artisan to decide on the dimensions of the materials, and talk about how the elements would join together. This particular version of the drawing is gridded, to give modestly precise dimensions for the eventual fabrication of the steel sculpture. Once this drawing was accepted by the clients, then I could give them fixed price, based on the lampshades, the steel work, the site visits and the design work.

This is perhaps the most interesting step in the design process. Photoshop is a very sophisticated computer program for manipulating images. It has a steep learning curve, but I have learned enough to be able to create something like this. I scanned in the line drawing and superimposed it on a cleaned-up version of the original room photo. I made the harsh ceiling lights disappear. I then photographed lampshades that I already had that were similar shapes to what I was proposing, and masked them -- that eliminates all the background, etc. so that I have only the image of the shades. Those are then layered in to the virual model. Everything needs to be correctly scaled, color balances need to be tweaked. It is very time consuming, but the result is stunning. In fact in this case, since there was a 7 month delay until final installation, I used the virutal model photo to show to other potential clients, and no one ever realized it was not the real mccoy until I explained what they were looking at.

My other steel-and-wood collaborations have been done with David Little, a blacksmith in NH. But for this project, the clients had a long standing relationship with a marvelous metalworker in their home state of Pennsylvania. So he created the steel work and sent me snapshots of some of the details as he worked them out. There are hundreds of small aesthetic and construction details that the blacksmith needs to figure out, that are not solved in my line drawing. In this shot, you can see how the vertical serpentine and the arcs intersect, and at the bottom right, the small hatch door that provides access to the wiring joinery.

Forutnately, this home is close enough to me that I could come to be part of the hanging. On the day after Thanksgiving, I arrived at the clients's home and helped with the installation and wiring. Working 18 feet from the floor is always a challenge. Half a year since this idea was hatched, is was wonderfully exciting to flip the switch and see the whole room come alive with the warm glow of the final sculpture. It was also remarkable to me to take this photo and compare it to the virtual model I had made 5 months before. Perhaps subjectively, I believe this piece is extremely successful, tailored to the specific space and decor of the room, unique and dramatic without being ostentatious. Functionally it serves its purpose of lighting the room and the pool table perfectly.