Bright Idea

A company that helped restore Notre-Dame reimagines the sea urchin as a shimmering bronze chandelier encrusted with over 800 semiprecious stones.

- Abigail Montanez

RÉGIS MATHIEU, HEAD OF the family-owned French lighting company Mathieu Lustrerie, has found inspiration for his ornate chandeliers from such disparate sources as Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and the banyan tree. For his latest collection, he looked to the ethereal marine-life drawings of 19th-century German artist and biologist Ernst Haeckel.

“Those crazy designs were so, so modern,” he says. “Also, Gustave Eiffel, who designed the Eiffel Tower, was inspired by the same artist.”

Shaped like underwater organisms including corals, jellyfish, and even a bejewelled sea urchin (right), the light fixtures echo the natural motifs and fluid lines of the art nouveau movement. “For me, art nouveau is a very crazy period, because in the 19th century, we discovered electricity,” explains Mathieu. “We started to put light behind the glass, and the light shined down, which was never possible with a flame.”

His father, Henri, founded the company in 1948, and now Mathieu’s daughter, Inès, is gradually taking the reins. It also restores and reissues chandeliers using centuries-old techniques. Most recently, it returned more than 70 fixtures inside Paris’s Notre-Dame to their original glory in the aftermath of the fire that destroyed much of the cathedral. Mathieu oversees a workshop and a gallery in the City of Light, as well as an atelier and lighting museum in the Provençal village of Gargas, where he houses his personal collection.