Incollect Magazine - Issue 14

Incollect Magazine 93 everything: managing and training staff, production, supply chain, clients, and project management. I also jump on the tools and try not to forget to do the fun, messy stuff too!” “Ideally, what I want to be doing is focusing on the design and prototyping with less day-to-day operational stuff,” he says. Ideas for pieces come to him all the time. “Practice makes perfect, and I sketch new ideas every single day,” he says, “I map out a conceptual idea first, and then at some point, if it feels like it’s right, we make a 3D file on the computer to think about it as a product. In the early days, we made smaller-scale models to test, but now, going on 5–6 years at this, we’ve got a good idea of what works and doesn’t. So we’ve become better and more confident at tackling new designs.” Holleman admits that he has an obsessive personality. “I think you have to be obsessed to do this,” he says, “you have to dream about what you are working on at night, and that is very much my personality.” Everything he looks at and sees around him goes into a kind of “mental catalog of what I like and don’t like that I draw upon,” he says. “Because I am so fixated on lamp designs, I often perceive things as lamps that aren’t. I see something and think ‘that would be cool to interpret into a lamp’.” Everything but the cast parts is handmade by his team and then assembled in his workshop. Mostly, his lighting is custom made. “We have a standard range, but we don’t really sell a standard product,” he says. “Our clients tend to come to us with a particular space and ask what I would suggest, so we are mostly making one-off pieces. It’s a long and involved process, partly because every project is different and partly because I’m always trying something new, so the process is never simple, and I like the challenge.” The elegant, minimal Dia Contemporary LED Chandelier is one of his most requested designs. It’s a versatile, functional design with, as he says, “swirling sculptural bends and folds of solid brass that support circular pockets of light.” At a glance, it resembles musical notation floating in space. Holleman concealed the brass joins within the LED light sources, which can themselves be adjusted “to direct and shape the light.” Musical references appear in other designs. The Lilly, Laur, Bonnie, or Sofia configurations, for example, exhibit subtle changes in repetition across vertical and horizontal axes. “The same subtle changes in repetition can be found in nature,” the designer explains. Nature is his primary source of inspiration, he Left: The Dia Chandelier. Like musical notes on a staff, circular pockets of light float up and down on the swirls and folds of brass arms. The LED lights can be articulated to angle light where you want it. Available in straight horizontal/vertical formats or curvy configurations. Right: The Sofia Chandelier, shown in Config 1 with Antique Brass structure and chocolate porcelain petals. A recent custom design featured plaster finish petals with a thin brass edge reveal. There are limitless possibilities, each one handmade and uniquely yours.