With the Horst collection, the proportions of the tripods would play well with a Barcelona chair and a Ward Bennett I Beam side table. Can you play decorator and pair them with other designs? Right: A giant Maine lobster decorates a floor lamp from Tennant’s Vanderbilt collection in a nod to Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. The surrounding debris includes an aluminum can, shotgun shells and a Luke Skywalker action figure. Left: This shadow box depicts a purple heron devouring a black cod. Where the handmade and machine-made meet is where beauty lies. I work with as many found vintage pieces and antiques as new parts and also use natural materials, like paper and seagrass, that add texture in a refined and elegant way. I play, test and stand back, like dressing a mannequin. They are movable, expressive and have the power to change a room. Everyone doesn’t need an illuminated Victorian taxidermy vitrine, but everyone needs a lamp. Illuminate us: Why did you decide to become a couture lamp maker?ĭuring COVID, as the magazine industry increasingly became a pale shadow of itself, I was looking to make something reproducible. Introspective recently spoke with Tennant about his pivot from journalism to handmade lamps, sustainable design and finding inspiration in the basement of a mansion. “And I have always been obsessed with giant examples of natural things.” “It marries the two disciplines: lighting and natural history,” he explains. The resulting Vanderbilt collection features an 80-inch bamboo lamp decorated with a jumbo taxidermy lobster. For his 2022 show at the Vanderbilt Museum, on Long Island’s North Shore, he referenced the “insanely cool” sculpture and furniture of Salvador Dalí. Horst, pairs baskets and Vietnamese non la field hats, woven to look like the hides of scaly anteaters known as pangolins, with vintage German-made camera tripods. Tennant’s Horst collection, an homage to the legendary fashion and celebrity photographer Horst P. Among the reference images he’s collected are photographs of an early-20th-century Japanese parasol maker and the Bohemian Grove campsite in Monte Rio, California. Taking cues from such lighting designers as Paavo Tynell and Carl Auböck, he created the 2022 World’s Fair Collection, a colorful array of table and floor lamps with bamboo poles, bases of coconut shell or coiled seagrass and shades fashioned from dazzling souvenir parasols from the Japanese pavilions of the 1933, 19 World’s Fairs. Tennant made this cheerful table lamp with a souvenir children’s parasol from the Japanese Pavilion at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.Īfter hanging similar fixtures in his own home, Tennant wondered whether parasols would also look good as shades on top of poles made from bamboo, which grew abundantly in his backyard. “We needed to fill a spot in the ceiling, and I had seen a tatty old house in the English countryside in an old magazine that had a couple of paper parasols for light fixtures.” “I spent lockdown figuring out the house,” he says. In 2020, he had bought a 1920s California-bungalow-style house in Brookhaven, Long Island, built by society architect Bradley Delehanty for Vogue editor Edna Woolman Chase. He has since worked with other creatives, like the architect Mark Zeff and Stefan Beckman, who designs sets for Tom Ford.ĭuring the pandemic, Tennant had a lightbulb moment about his artistic calling. His earliest vitrines caught the attention of art collectors and interior designers, including Nina Freudenberger, who told Tennant she’d need 10 to put together his very first show, which opened at her New York City store, Haus Interior, over a decade ago. “Along the way, I learned taxidermy repair, carpentry, wiring and glass cutting by making every mistake you could,” he says, laughing. Top: His floor and table lamps are crafted from materials like vintage parasols, camera tripods and coconut shells. In his atelier in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, Christopher Tennant creates lighting and dioramas from a mix of antique, vintage and found objects (photo by Ivan Bideac).
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