Lights out: Luceplan

2020 saw a boom in highly designed, highly lived-in exterior spaces, but it’s not just a 12-month phenomenon. From decks to terraces, verandas, porches and patios, by allowing these outdoor living environments to interact with the indoor, breaking down barriers with widescreen points of egress and referencing styles and materials throughout the unbroken space, designers can create a synergy between both environments and streamline the flow through a home’s floor plan.

Performing a major role in increasing the liveability of any space, lighting reflects these changing trends, with the latest outdoor lighting products utilising new technologies and innovative materials to extend the indoors out, while creating new outdoor spaces that feel just as comfortable.

The Italian lighting brand Luceplan is known for using research to apply new technologies and material innovation to their latest designs, with expansive decorative interior lights of all types, as well as an established presence in the technically specialised acoustic lighting sector. This latest trend for moving life outdoors has encouraged the company to forge a new path and a new collection, serving the emerging market with a collection of proposals designed by one long-standing collaboration and two new ones.

Luceplan asked Daniel Rybakken, designer of the Fienile table lamp, to extend the memorable Fienile design to outdoor applications. ‘I chose the name Fienile (hayloft) as a precise reference to the farm in Norway where my grandfather spent his childhood.’ tells Rybakken, of his inspiration for the original light, ‘with its low-pitched roof, lateral pillars and central wall (Fienile) explicitly suggests the world of Nordic architecture.’

This sense of the architectural is even stronger in the product’s latest exterior iterations. When multiple Fieniles line up to light a path or boundary, the two heights of 32 or 72cm take on the form of miniature houses or tower blocks, creating a modern model village that perfectly complements their surrounding architectural landscape.

That recognisable low-pitched roof sits atop a solid aluminium structure and spreads light gently through a polycarbonate diffuser, uniformly lighting the ground, while the taller 72cm version also bounces reflected light from its own facade, making the colour choice of either light or dark grey an important one.

Along with recreating previous favourites for outdoor use, Luceplan invited new designers to create three brand new forms, before combining them with Fienile into a fresh outdoor collection. Among these designers were the award-winning team of Meneghello Paolelli Associati, whose Nui light brings together two interconnected cylindrical forms.

Both sculpturally cast in light grey concrete, Nui’s paired shapes combine to make a decorative lamp with a strong but surprisingly playful personality. As a double-flat-edged cylinder, Nui’s upper half appears to magically hover above a soft bed of light, bringing an illusionary weightlessness to its structure. While the lower shape sees the addition of a hemispherical upper edge, carefully balancing its top half on a curve that shapes Nui’s angled light.

On another side of the family, sits the Nui Mini, a rechargeable table light that can be used, or even moved, inside or out. Featuring balanced cylindrical shapes that mirror its older sibling, Nui Mini is instead formed with an aluminium top that diffuses refracted light through its crystal base, creating a natural spotlight on the outdoor stage.

Also featuring a portable and rechargeable option, but much larger in form, is the Flia familia of outdoor floor lamps from designer Alessandro Zambelli. Attached to floors and decks or stood directly in the ground, the manoeuvrable Flia either stands alone in single configurations of various heights or as multiples with two or three carbon fibre stems. With small aluminium light housings and tall, perfectly balanced necks, the characterful lights achieve an inquisitive, animalistic presence, like a flamboyance of flamingoes, lifting their heads to cautiously to scope the horizon.

‘There are no longer any clear separations or distinctions [between indoor and outdoor], there is instead a growing aesthetic and functional osmosis between different settings’ states Patrizia Vicenzi, CEO of Luceplan. By connecting the two with recurring or moveable lighting motifs, a limiting life inside can be expanded, allowing residents to experience an outdoor lifestyle while retaining an interior level of comfort.

Luceplan’s outdoor collection lights the way towards a life surrounded by the seductive sense of nature, yet remains unaffected by the elements.

© Architonic