molo’s cappello lamp was released in 2010 but the little lamp has a long history of development that started with a competition win by molo co founders Stephanie Forsythe + Todd MacAllen in 2003.
Stephanie and I demonstrated our first ideas of how expandable honeycomb textile structures could create furniture and rooms themselves through a number of competitions. One of these was Lightouch 2002/3 where we showed the earliest versions of integrally lit honeycomb furniture.
We won the competition and, as part of the prize, were invited to visit the lighting company Flos, in Italy. Traveling to their various suppliers we were able to learn how components were made, including Arco lamp’s marble block and Glow lamp’s blown glass fixture.
After the visit to Flos we designed love letter, which began with the idea of expressing thanks and admiration to Ingo Maurer and the Castiglioni brothers for the ingenuity and emotion of the designs they have brought into the world. In making the marble base for the Arco, a cylindrical core is carved from the stone to make a hole for lifting the heavy lamp, and these very cores from the Arco lamp were used to form the base of one version of love letter.
love letters are playful “light sculptures” onto which you can pen thoughts of personal sentiment.
love letter light sculptures have as their source of light a specially produced thin, two-sided electroluminescent film which glows softly within a simple vellum envelope.
As we began making and experimenting with LED light sources for other projects we began thinking of a very simple, highly efficient LED version of the marble based lamp. This idea became cappello.
cappello is a small lamp but is very much about defining space on a desk or table. It is lit by LED, shaded by a paper “cap” or cappello in Italian and is set upon the same cylinder of soft white Carrara marble as love letter to Ingo Maurer and the Castiglioni brothers.
cappello is very simple but has a much flexibility. It is easily demountable, can be adjusted, and is made from a minimum of parts requiring a minimum of manufacturing.
Though love letter is now sold out, cappello maintains the spirit of play and experimentation that was found in the original design.