Starry Constellation

In the parallel universe created by New York’s Apparatus, lights, furniture and objects manifest as ancient totems blazing into space-age form.

Stephen Todd

THERE’S NO TALE as compelling as a New York success story. When Jeremy Anderson and Gabriel Hendifar moved from Los Angeles to the Big Apple in 2011 it was to take up a job in PR and look for work in fashion, respectively. Within a year they had launched what has become one of the most directional and respected lighting brands of the decade.

Apparatus was born of necessity, flourished in a climate of renewal as the world readjusted after the GFC and is maturing into a brand with the confidence to turn out work that is at once personal and political. Their latest collection, called Act III, is based on a nuanced reading of Hendifar’s Iranian origins. It includes a series of ‘Median’ lamps composed of translucent alabaster discs intersected by fluted brass canisters, at once space age and timeless.

Another group, called ‘Talisman’, deploys beads of agate, jasper and jade fixed to leather-bound metal, elegant totems reminiscent of statuary found in the city of Persepolis, once the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. Vessels and candlesticks mounted on marble spheres form a suite titled ‘Shiraz’ in reference to the ancient Persian hometown of Hendifar’s grandmother. The accompanying film showcases his mother’s ethereal singing and features a little boy home alone in a fantastical modernist palace with vertiginous views across a majestic desert landscape.