The encounter between a designer and a company always generates interesting intersections between different formal vocabularies, aesthetics, sensibilities and attitudes. Milan Design Week (15 to 21 April 2024) will celebrate a new encounter between Lodes, a designer and manufacturer of lighting solutions with a distinctive decorative mark, and Paola Navone – OTTO Studio, an eclectic designer with an unconventional style and vision.

The result of this collaboration is Oblò, a pendant lamp with a strongly decorative character that offers new insights into the use of Pyrex in lighting, which can be modelled like a liquid, malleable material. The product explores an imagery linked to the marine world, a theme as yet little explored in the field of lighting design, which gives the lamp a distinctive and unique personality.

Paola Navone describes the spirit of the new lamp, and how certain details of the design emphasise its concept: "Oblò is a fun family of lamps that brings with it the feeling of the sea. The glass diffuser, which has a soft, rounded shape, is supported by a knotted cable and seems to float in the air like a buoy. There is a hint of surprise: the knotted cable feeds a non-visible LED source that illuminates the diffuser. Thus only the glass is visible, just as if looking through a porthole. The diffuser is imagined in three different shapes and five finishes, three of which are non-colours reminiscent of the transparency of the sea. A single lamp is a playful point of light. Many lamps make up a thousand different installations."

The inspiration from the sea is thus found in the product's fluid silhouette and in a colour palette of tones and shades ranging from iridescent to metallic blue, to silk white, glossy smoke and transparent, bringing to mind the marine imagery and reflections of light on water.Oblò offers high luminosity: despite its limited volume, it allows even a medium-sized top to be illuminated; in some finishes, moreover, this intense luminosity is filtered through the glass, creating special light effects.

Massimiliano Tosetto, Managing Director of Lodes, comments on the new collaboration as follows: "We are delighted to collaborate with Paola Navone – OTTO Studio on this new lamp, which expands Lodes' portfolio, adapting perfectly to a wide range of environments. The flexibility offered by Oblò in terms of compositions and finishes will be narrated by the designer through a surprising colourful installation during Milan Design Week, at Lodes' Milan showroom.

The new product will be presented in the Lodes showroom on via Moscova. We will find the Oblò lamps, many of them, floating in the air like luminous buoys, while red-painted metal tubes will compose shapes that recall beach cabins, everywhere white and red stripes in infinite combinations. To be discovered are the glimpses offered by the large portholes in the shop windows, designed to reinterpret the act of looking at the beach from a boat in the middle of the sea.