6 minute read
Shaping Light and Design with Olivia Barry
By STEF SCHWALB
Award-winning Ceramic Sconces, Innovative Design—and That’s Just the Beginning
One of the most exciting aspects of attending industry tradeshows is running into new talent and products, and because this is an amazing time for lighting, there’s so much to discover. Postpandemic, more consumers are gravitating toward high-quality investment pieces, and the importance of lighting fixtures—their impact and influence on interior design in particular—has made creativity and ingenuity the barometers for success. Finding rising stars is always enticing; it’s fun to profile professionals who you know are on the cusp of blowing up in the marketplace. Case in point: Olivia Barry of Olivia Barry by Hand, who was the winner of the 2023 NYCXDESIGN Awards in the sconce category for her Scroll Luminaire Sconces. In addition to the judges, they immediately caught my eye at ICFF, too.
The ingenious, wall-mounted style of Barry’s Scroll Luminaire Table Lamp is made from hand-rolled, furled ceramic that was designed to project light onto the lamp’s curved body while simultaneously concealing its bulb’s glare. The result is a bright, ambient light derived from a hardwired 3000K LED with dimmer driver. “I designed this luminaire as the answer to the question of how to design a table lamp that doesn’t have a lampshade. I didn’t want any visible bulbs; I don’t like the glare,” she explains. “I started making the table lamps first, and then I made a sconce version of the same idea.” But before we get into more details on that, let me provide a bit of backstory on Barry and how her work came to be.
With a professional career in industrial design as well as a lifelong practitioner of ceramic arts—in fact, she apprenticed under Eva Zeisel for more than a decade in the latter—Barry has combined two talents into one brand to produce ceramic lighting and artwork installations at her Hudson Valley studio. “I was trained as an industrial designer, and people always joke that industrial designers just draw pretty things and don’t really know how everything works,” she says, “and I really want to prove that wrong.” How is she doing it? By continuing to evolve her business. While her background includes designing ceramic dinnerware collections for companies such as Royal Stafford and Crate & Barrel, her handmade lamps have attracted the eye of several architects and interior designers across the greater metro New York area and beyond. Some clients include architects Zack McKown + Calvin Tsao, Robert A.M. Stern Interiors, and Elizabeth Roberts Architects.
So how did lighting design begin for Barry? It all started in 2017 with a request from Robert A.M. Stern Interiors for the designer to create some lamp pieces—specifically bases. Although she had never created one classically, Barry knew she was up for the challenge. The only issue?
The shades. “I kept making these bases, but they kept having to get shades put on them,” she notes, and because she was living in Brooklyn at the time, Barry had to keep trekking large pieces to lampshade shops via the subway or her car, which got her thinking: What about designing lamps without the shades?
“That’s partially what inspired the Scroll Luminaire Table Lamps and Sconces,” she continues, “because necessity is the mother of invention, right?” Truthfully, playing with the idea of shape came to Barry about eight years ago. “I’m a lifetime ceramicist trained as an industrial designer, so there’s an overlap of the craft and the engineering,” she says. “I made a few pieces, entered one into an auction for New York Design Trust for Public Space, and at that auction there was a bidding war. Then I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I have something here.’ So I started figuring out how to produce them in small batch quantities.” The fixtures are still made one by one today, each signed and numbered in the interior, so every piece is a little different than the other, but Barry has developed a technique (design patent pending) where she can produce them in a very efficient way.
Of course, to achieve her goal of increasing product production, Barry needed more room to grow, and we saw the results of how she did it firsthand. “I was in Brooklyn for some 20 years, and I needed space for this, so I moved to Tarrytown and built my studio here,” she says as we toured the area. Now her new home doubles as her workspace. “This is my dream studio. This is where I make everything. I like having my workspace in my basement not only because I have no overhead, but I can be upstairs, put my child to bed, come downstairs, and work until midnight (if I feel like it) without having to go anywhere.” Although soon enough Barry will likely have to expand to meet increasing demand, currently her studio and the backyard kiln she constructed (all on her own) work perfectly. “I’m proud of this because I can make a lot in a small space, and with a lot of the pieces I’ve developed, I’ve had to make my own jigs,” she explains. In addition to the Scroll Luminaire Wall Sconce, some other pieces include the Illuminated Wall Leaf Sconce, Crescent Moon Wall Sconce, Mirror Light Sconce, and Blue Moon Light Sconce—all beautiful, bright, and dimmable, and a few in striking colors such as Gunmetal Glaze and Grey Ombré. Her series of art installations also sometimes feature backlighting achieved with Chip on Board LED tape.
It’s important to note that ICFF was actually Barry’s first tradeshow as an exhibitor. Although her official start on this lighting work was 2020, she’s spent the bulk of her time focused on research and design, figuring out several aspects of her process, and problem solving. Because of the pandemic, the original tradeshow that Barry was set up to do, the Architectural Digest Design Show in March 2020, got cancelled, so ICFF was her industry debut. “I’m so happy to have done ICFF and get over the other side of the hill of big achievements,” she adds, which included connecting with Kasper Larsen of Ludwig & Larsen, who performed UL testing on all of her pieces—all approved. “I haven’t been panicking about selling too much because I don’t want people coming to ask for pieces until I’m good and ready.” But of course that time is quickly approaching. Because thoughtful design and welcoming spaces have filtered into every aspect of interior design—from medical offices to airports, corporate workplaces and everything in between—we predict Olivia Barry by Hand will be one lighting designer to watch going forward.
