If you’ve known me for more than a few years, you’ll remember my epic remodel, which required that my son and I vacate our home for a solid six months of demolition and construction.
If you’ve known me for more than a few minutes, you’ll understand that I overthought every detail and probably micro-managed each stage of the process.
And if you’ve been to my house, you’ll know that whatever this cost me—in units of energy, effort, and time—it was worth it. Anker and I have an intelligent, beautiful home that practically tidies itself. And it seems to fit the spaciousness of an apartment twice its size into its trim sixty meters. Plus the birch-plywood-meets-grey-linen scheme hasn’t aged a day—and playful utility keeps the clean lines and optimal white balance from coming off as (too?) sterile.
One of my favorite details—and success stories—from this creative time dots our ceilings with clean, well-proportioned lamp canopies cast in porcelain. Sparked by my lifelong dissatisfaction with second-rate lamp parts, this project began and ended at the prototype stage, with assembly entirely improvised. Still, the results have held up well, and so far I’ve never had to snip off the knots that hold up the canopies to give an electrician access, after which I would of course have to apply the same makeshift (though sort of wonderful) string-based solution. I delight in the way our canopies match not individual pendant lamps (with their diverse colors, materials, and styles), but the ceiling itself—as it should be.
My canopies borrowed shape from a long-decommissioned IKEA plastic part that seemed close to perfect, and they were made to measure by Warsaw-based potter Katarzyna Stefaniak. Considering the uncertainty of the porcelain process, Kasia created several early prototypes, so we could evaluate matters of size and proportion in relation to the physical space. Next, she made double the number of canopies we actually needed, accounting for the ways some would crack in the kiln, others would warp too extremely, and others still might get broken with use. Interestingly, those that warped just barely, but ever-so-visibly, were even more perfect than those that seemed not to get bent out of shape at all. We wound up going up a size or two from our original reference point, and we opted for more of a diagonal taper.
Over the years I’ve wondered if this is a hot design idea waiting to happen, or if it’s merely one girl’s artisanal riff on something IKEA sold cheaply years ago. The question remains open, but the spare parts on the ceiling continue to please.