Let There Be Lindsey

Let There Be Lindsey

Artists often choose to live in softly neutral spaces with a soupçon of Zen, the better to swap new works in and out to see how they resonate and glow in a real setting. So perhaps it’s no surprise that such an approach has been embraced by lighting designer Lindsey Adelman, whose fixtures have, in the past decade, moved modern illumination into the territory of sculpture. She has turned the Park Slope, Brooklyn, townhouse she recently moved to with her husband, Ian—chief creative officer at New York magazine—and their 14-year-old son, Finn, into a subtly minimal background for a revolving array of chandeliers and sconces, many of them one of a kind. Some are displayed for weeks or months; others, only a day or two. 

“Changing out lighting all the time is not like rehanging paintings,” she says. “It’s amazingly complicated. You almost need to have an electrician move in with you. But for me, it’s part of my creative process. I love to see things in context, in real life—to live with them.”

That Adelman, whose intensity is balanced by her big, off-kilter grin, uses her home partially as a laboratory is only one of the distinctive ways in which she runs her practice, which she opened in Brooklyn in 2006. She is known almost as much for the unconventional work environment in her New York and Los Angeles studios and showrooms as for her poetic fixtures, which mix unconventional metals with handblown glass, including her now-iconic first collection, Branching Bubble. She encourages her 40-plus employees to take breaks for meditation and daydreaming, both of which she considers elemental to true creativity. She even casts them as backup dancers in the impressionistic music videos she shoots to showcase her designs.