Leading light

AS HE LAUNCHES A SHOW AT SALONE DEL MOBILE, SCOTT RICHLER, FOUNDER OF GABRIEL SCOTT, EXPLAINS HOW LIGHTING IS THE JEWELLERY OF A ROOM

- FIONA MCCARTHY

For Canadian-born, London-based Scott Richler, creative director and founder of furniture and lighting brand Gabriel Scott, the satisfaction of design lies in the intricacy of the detail. ‘I often think of a seductive detail before knowing what the object will be,’ he explains as we meet in Gabriel Scott’s elegant, pared-back showroom just a stone’s throw from Mayfair’s Savile Row (the company has another showroom in New York’s SoHo and a manufacturing base in Montreal).

With an earlier career in designing women’s fashion accessories, as co-founder of the internationally successful brand Jennifer Scott, the architecture-trained designer was inspired to transfer the component-driven approach behind making jewellery into furniture and lighting when he first established Gabriel Scott with his brother-in-law Gabriel Kakon (no longer involved in the business) in 2012.

Take the Welles chandelier, for instance, where polished metallic prongs clasp together a system of handcrafted hollowed glass or metal prisms – ‘or if you want to be geeky, they’re called cuboctahedrons, with eight triangular and six square faces,’ Scott laughs – to create a lighting system strung like a bracelet. Here, the elements can be connected in a number of configurations and lengths, and the prisms themselves arranged at different angles and then hung to appear as if ‘floating in the air, emitting a cloud of soft light through its multifaceted, sculpturally innovative silhouette,’ Scott enthuses.