Designing Interiors is like telling a story of a person or a place. You can bring a public space to life using design as a narrative tool. When Studio Far West were first appointed to work with Headland Hotel, Newquay, one of the areas we were asked to Concept Design was the Samphire Restaurant with panoramic Atlantic Ocean views, and a broad offering of all-day dining experiences ranging from breakfast to afternoon tea, fine dining to events.
Lighting was a key element which needed addressing and we wanted to bring an organic sculptural element to our design proposal to replace the rather regular repetitive nature of the existing pendant drum lights. Drawing inspiration from local Cornish Rock Samphire we got to work studying the natural form of the stems and thinking about how this could be interpreted and translated into a sculptural installation incorporating decorative lighting.
Coincidentally we had recently come across the stunning work of Tom Heywood who is master of steam bending woodwork. We visited him at his workshop in Penzance to meet him and see some of his recent creations. He obviously shared a mutual passion for the natural world in Cornwall and his skills in steam bending woodwork were perfect for the challenge of creating our hotel design and Samphire vision.
We brainstormed the concept together sharing our initial Rock samphire imagery and developed hand sketches to design a fixture that had both an impressive scale, yet a delicacy of proportion. Tom took our ideas and was able to enhance them to detail a fluted core from which the individual stems were fixed, enabling each pendant to have a unique form. This strategy gave us a central fixing point to work with the existing ceiling light positions and gave flexibility of sizing allowing different shape pendants throughout the space. Tom created a full size prototype of the fitting in steam bent oak which was well received by the client team and really helped sell the idea prior to proceeding to manufacture.
