There is a particular kind of meeting (you will know it) in which a great deal is decided about a project, and almost none of it concerns the lighting.
Budgets are defended, finishes are agonised over, furniture choices acquire the gravity of a peace treaty. And then, somewhere near the end, someone glances up at a flat grid of recessed downlights and says, “but what about the lighting?.” Lighting, the one element guaranteed to be switched on every single day, is forever invited last.
J. Adams & Co. have spent the better part of a decade quietly arguing the opposite, and at this year’s 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen — where we were happily among the crowd — they made the case by unveiling five new additions to the Apex collection. The premise is simple and slightly stubborn: take kiln-formed glass, a centuries-old craft in which sheets are heated until they hold the imprint of their own making, set it within a geometric brass frame, and let the two materials disagree productively. The brass is precise; the glass refuses to be. What you get is depth that shifts as you move past it, making Apex behave less like a lighting fixture and more like a small, well-mannered event on the wall.
The Apex Collection explores the interplay of light through textured, kiln-formed glass. Suspended from a solid brass framework, layers of patterned glass create depth and visual intrigue, shifting with perspective.
What makes the launch of these new collections useful, rather than merely interesting, is the width of the new releases. The five new pieces (the Apex Slim Wall Light, the Vertical Pendant, the Linear Pendant, the Double Linear Pendant, and the Floor Light) span the full vocabulary of a product family, from a floor lamp with real presence to a Slim Wall pared back, low-profile, and rated IP44. That last one is the one specifiers love, because it means the same design language can carry from an entrance hall into a bathroom without anyone having to phone the manufacturer to ask. Pendant, linear, double-linear, floor and wall: a family flexible enough to specify across an entire project.
There is real craft underneath all of it: designed in a Clerkenwell studio, made in a Birmingham workshop with over fifty years behind it, one tree planted for every light sold, and a five-year guarantee that suggests the studio expects these to outlast the trends that occasioned them.
J. Adams & Co. were delighted to make their debut at 3daysofdesign this year, presenting alongside their local partners, Møller & Rothe, within their beautifully curated pavilion in Copenhagen.
Design Director Will Earl describes the kiln-formed glass as a quiet tension between control and chance — which is also, if we’re honest, a fair description of most good projects.
For Nordic interiors, where the light outside does so much of the work for half the year, a fitting this considered for the other half feels less like an indulgence and more like good sense. Look up sooner.
Author
Owen Wray
Founder Sirus Concepts
