The designer Kevin Reilly is renowned for his work with lights. Taking a completely new approach, this artist of light uses candles to produce lamps that are both modern and old-fashioned.
Working with a small staff of artisans, his source material is the wax candle. Carving out the inside of each candle and inserting a special bulb that does not melt its high-temperature wax allows Reilly to make permanently burning sources of soft light. These distinctive wax pillars are embedded with unique electrical fittings enabling each fixture to emit a warm glow throughout the day or night. Because of this, the fixtures do not have the same look in the daytime as when night falls. As Reilly says, “A light during the day needs to be minimal and sculptural, but at night it should be magical.” This is exactly the transformation his works go through when the sun goes down.
The design has scope and has taken on different forms. Kevin Reilly has evolved the original model into an elegant collection of chandeliers, sconces, floor lamps, table lamps, and outdoor lighting. Now, that special glow can be fitted to the different rooms of the house, different parts of the room, or even to the garden outside. And because it is the craft that matters to this passionate designer, each fixture is meticulously handmade at every stage. To him, “The light should reveal a memorable experience.” His gamble has paid off. Today his designs are distributed ali över the world, and his uncompromising artistic integrity has won him a follovving in ali areas of design, with his works frequently appearing in magazines and journals.
The appeal of Kevin Reilly’s light fixtures is due to their refusal to compromise on what are two important aspects of any decorative use of lighting for our time: being charming without refusing modern technology. The genius in Reilly’s approach was to make that light source into something one doesn’t need to worry will burn the house down. However he has never compromised on the issue of old-fashioned crafting. Through their perfect mix of the old and the new, the modernly convenient and the romantically decorative, these are truly candles for the twenty-first century. www.kevinreillylighting.com
