Since founding his eponymous studio in 2013 with the ethereal Halo collection of lighting, Matthew McCormick’s designs have captivated onlookers in divine homes and otherworldly spaces from the celestial atrium of a Vancouver event space, to a private residence in Toronto with 30-feet of of glass cabochon suspended within its grand spiral staircase.
In addition to working on impressive custom projects, Matthew McCormick Studio offers an array of lighting designs that we carry here at Hollace Cluny; one of the most popular being the playful and delicate Mila collection, which includes pendants of varying dimensions as well as a sconce style.
“As a designer, I like to iterate,” McCormick says about how he and his team approach crafting the uncanny pieces they’re known for. “Through that iterative process, we’re refining down to that one note – the one magic thing a particular light has. For the Mila collection, the magic is in how the bulb is kind of ‘impossibly’ balanced.”
Indeed, a trick of the eye is one signature of McCormick’s design language, which sees effortlessly artistic proportions interplay with well-considered materials such as alabaster, and a variety of mouth-watering marbles and Roman Travertine. Ova, the studio’s ode to organic forms, comprises of a collection featuring cascades of pleasingly round handmade glass.
Another key characteristic of McCormick’s practice is the desire to collaborate and build community, and the studio’s showroom shares space with local furniture company Lock & Mortice in Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood. “We’d done collaborative projects with them in the past,” he notes, adding that beginning their brick-and-mortar journey during the pandemic was a wild idea. “It’s kind of a multi-purpose space for us now – it’s part gallery, and we host events there.”
Most recently, Matthew McCormick Studio launched a desk light called the Ben Lamp fashioned from hand-carved solid stone, and here, the designer shares more about this elegant piece, the importance of creating a mood in a room, and why seeing an Ingo Maurer lamp was a lightbulb moment for him.
What’s your earliest memory of being touched by a piece of design?
Close to twenty years ago I was with a friend at Inform, a retailer here in Vancouver. I saw an Ingo Maurer light there; and all these years later, he’s turned out to be one of my design heroes. His work, and this light especially – an odd table lamp that looks like it was made from different things you’d find around the house, like a tea strainer – showed me that it’s not necessarily the precious materials that you're using in a design, or its superfluous ornate details. It's the intrinsic way in which something is put together. Most designers will say he was the maestro when it comes to lighting design because his work was made with the most wacky and weird stuff, but he truly understood lighting, shadow and perception.
And what keeps compelling you to create lighting designs?
It’s obvious that lighting can really make or break a space; but then there's something to be said about creating interesting forms, or objects, that serve a purpose. Lights have to fulfil their function, but they almost come to life when you turn them on, too.
I’ve said to my wife that our family home is going to be the backdrop to our kids’ memories, so creating certain moods in each environment is important. In our living room alone, we have nine sources of light. I think everyone has one area that they really invest in and for me, it's always been lighting. And, while an overhead light has its purpose, I think that you should be able to light your space without having to turn it on.
Speaking of your kids, let’s talk about one of your newer pieces, the Ben Lamp.
Just to go back a bit – when I was designing the Mila Collection, my wife was pregnant with our first child. And I don't know if I was consciously aware of it or not, but the way my wife clasped her hands while she was pregnant – resting them around the lower part of her belly – well, the light makes that same sort of gesture. So, I'd be remiss if I didn't call it Mila, after our first daughter.
When it came to the Ben Lamp, I knew I wanted to do something personal, and it was a labour of love for me. As a design team, oftentimes when we're coming up with a new product we start with a brief – what product category are we going after? What type of materials? What problems are we trying to solve? Is it a desk lamp? Is it a pendant system? And then when we go to sketch, we’re iterating until we have that one magical element in the design.
The inspiration started off with Dutch peg dolls made out of wood; they’re quite elementary, and the shape is very recognizable. That was our entry point. And as young kids do, my son loves to stack blocks and rocks; so those kind of instinctively created shapes came into play. Our team worked on the design more, and when we started looking at materials, I knew I wanted to work with stone because we haven’t used it much. And the lamp just blossomed from there.
The bespoke Cabochon lighting project in a private residence in Toronto.
What have been some of your favorite collaborative projects?
I think most of my team would agree that doing custom projects really fills my cup, yet we’re very discerning about what we work on.
When you're designing your own collection, it's so internal. You don't have any bumpers for what you design. It can feel like, where do you even start? You’ve got too many ideas! So having parameters and having a focus for the creativity is helpful. We work with a lot of incredible designers from around the world, and we only take on, say, three to five bespoke projects a year.
A good example is a private residence project in Toronto that we did, which we worked on for over a year; this light suspends 30 feet from the ceiling without any visible fasteners and weighs over 1,000 pounds – there’s a lot of engineering involved in the design. It’s also made from 750 artisanal glass cabochon pieces, and I was blown away when we lit it up for the first time. The client had a great art collection, and this is the only decorative light fixture in the whole home; it’s situated in a three-storey spiral staircase carved out of limestone. We have the pièce de résistance in the house.
We feel so fortunate to have collaborated with Diego Burdi of BurdiFilek on this home, and it's never lost on me that people are willing to believe in what we're doing and invest in us working together, and we'll do everything in our power to it knock out of the park for them.