London and Marrakech are lit up with art in Lasvit’s glass and light installations

15 December 2023

From private homes to prestigious contract locations: Lasvit expresses its manufacturing tradition in three new spectacular installations of light, blown glass and design. It is the meeting point between art and lighting and the three places are prestigious and significant. These are the La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech, the Sketch restaurant, and the Raffles Hotel in London. Two very different contexts that Lasvit has been able to interpret by respecting the genius loci and offering its craftsmanship to the creativity of three designers: Jouin Manku for the installation in the capital of Morocco, Mária Čulenová (Chief Designer of Lasvit) for Sketch and Petra Sošťáková for the Raffles Hotel. These are spectacular creations by which you can be won over and inspired to create lighting projects that can not only illuminate the home but also make it unique and evocative.

Le Chandelier du Centenaire: tribute of light to Berber iconography

The three thousand glass elements that make up, like gigantic necklaces, the approximately nine-metre chandelier suspended one meter above the ground in the hall of La Mamounia are inspired by traditional Berber jewellery. The historic hotel in Marrakech, located in front of the Kutubiyya Mosque, is one hundred years old and to celebrate this extraordinary milestone it asked Lasvit to create a breathtaking installation. It is made up of electrified cables intertwined with red threads, a color rooted in the Berber tradition, with hand-blown and hand-crafted glass elements, reminiscent of strings of pearls. In the center of the chandelier there are some silver elements that create reflections and were created by Moroccan artisans involved in the creation of the work with the intention of linking it to the territory. In the hotel bar, La Majorelle, Lasvit and Jouin Manku created a second installation with a wall lamp made of hand-blown glass petals and a series of prisms suspended over the bar area.

Poppies: a sky of poppies for war heroes

Remembrance Day is celebrated on 11 November in the United Kingdom, to commemorate the heroes of the two world conflicts. The symbol of this anniversary is the poppy, which appears everywhere in those days and especially in the British capital. Here, in what was once the Old War Office, Winston Churchill’s office, today there is one of the most sophisticated hotels in London, the Raffles Hotel. In this space, starting from the symbolism of the red flower, designer Petra Sošťáková has created an impressive installation creating an authentic sky of large poppies in fused glass handcrafted by Lasvit. Between shades of red, different textures, different movements, the company gave shape to the idea of “capturing the essence of natural poppy flowers, their swaying movement in the fields and their deep meaning” that Sošťáková had in mind.

Herbarium: An urban forest in the trendy restaurant

The Glade, inside Sketch, is one of the most interesting restaurants in London from a design point of view, constantly renovated like a perpetual artistic installation. In this space, Mária Čulenová, Chief Designer of Lasvit, has inserted a majestic gold version of the Herbarium chandelier, for the creation of which Lasvit uses a unique technique of its kind. Each of the hundreds of glass elements is poured, as a liquid, onto flowers, herbs, and dry branches in a sort of communion between craftsmanship and the nature of the forests that surround the company’s laboratories. The result is small glass stalactites whose soul is composed of a natural element and a special golden finish which makes the whole even more magical and evocative.

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