A maestro of lighting, Italian designer Davide Groppi orchestrates visual drama with his barely there fixtures.
Davide Groppi’s Milan showroom isn’t easy to find. Located down a narrow, cobblestone street, it occupies a storefront with no signage, except for his name printed on one window. Inside, the space feels more like a gallery, with little in the way of furniture to disrupt the pristine atmosphere. Only the occasional spot of light suggests that there is something to actually look at. On the floor sits a white polycarbonate cube, internally lit by an unseen bulb; in a case on a wall, a row of 35‑millimetre slides slowly flashes on and off in some predetermined sequence. And, tucked at the back in a darkened anteroom, a single light casts edgeless shadows.
Left: Sampei lamps elegantly animate the interior of Barino Café in Piacenza, in a historical space where permanent fixtures are verboten. Right: In Black Block, an eight-millimetre hole located directly above a special optical system beams light upward from an 11-watt LED.
Tall, elegant and quick with a smile, Groppi eagerly describes what he does as a kind of magic, more playful than technical. Since 1988, the designer has crafted lighting fixtures that are modest in scale but change a room dramatically. He has worked with the biggest brands, designing lighting for Valcucine and Boffi kitchens and table lamps for De Padova, while running his studio in Piacenza, with a staff of 20; operating three showrooms (the others are in Barcelona and Copenhagen); and projecting into the future with an eye on opening another showroom in New York.
Designed in 2009, Saba has an inverted aluminum lampshade that casts a focused pool of light.
What makes his lights stand out is how unassuming they appear at first. His Foil sconces, for example, look like nothing more than tiny wall-mounted shelves; Miss is essentially a suspended tube 75 centimetres in length that projects a shaft of light with film noir allure. He credits his moody oeuvre to a host of influences: he is a fan of Japanese minimalism, the surrealist painter René Magritte, and, not surprisingly, Caravaggio, the baroque painter who perfected the chiaroscuro technique of illuminating figures within an otherwise darkened background.
Left: For his Miss series, illumi- nation from a five-watt LED travels down a 25‑millimetre- wide tube, to be diffused as an isolated spotlight. Groppi also designed a light source powered by four lemons. Right: Moon, made of Japanese paper, on display at Groppi’s Milan showroom.
Caravaggio’s spotlighting effects are also Groppi’s. One of his best-known pieces, designed with Enzo Calabrese in 2011, is the Sampei floor lamp, which stands 4.4 metres tall. The telescopic, reed-thin fixture is capped with a black cup that projects a pool of illumination, offering an elegant solution for downlighting with no need to install permanent fixtures; it’s especially popular in restaurants aiming for an ethereal atmosphere. At Barino Café in Piacenza, for instance, Sampei lights rise above each linen-covered table casting light onto dinner plates. “Sometimes you don’t even notice where the light is coming from,” he says, “but you see it on the table. It’s really fantastic.”
Eco-LED sconces made of brushed metal shine upward and down.
While he has shifted into LED technology, many of Groppi’s pieces still use incandescence and pay tribute to his abiding love for naked bulbs. At the entrance to his showroom, the first fixture seen is one of his latest in a series that feature glowing Edison filaments. This one, called Edivad (“Davide” spelled backwards) hangs upside down. The inversion, explains Groppi, was inspired by Magritte’s realistic though implausible paintings. It is also nod to light’s shapeshifting evolution.
