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Lee Broom’s Opticality Exhibition

Whole new light.

In advance of London Design Festival this month, British lighting and furniture designer Lee Broom is transforming his Shoreditch showroom into a simulacrum of…his childhood bedroom. But banish thoughts of band posters and teddy bears; Broom, ever the aesthete, decorated his room with a sixties-by-way-of-the-nineties op art style—and now he’s reinventing it to suit sophisticated modern tastes.

Broom’s new graphic, monochromatic Optical orb lights will help him turn his showroom into Opticality, an exploratory exhibit in which visitors can discover optical illusions, and be challenged to look at design pieces from different angles. When the concept was previewed at this year’s Salone Del Mobile as part of Broom’s roving Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan exhibition at Milan Design Week, it was selected from over 1,500 installations as one of the best—earning Broom a Milano Design Award 2016 nomination.

Broom has a history of creating ambitious installations—such as transforming a row of empty shops into a mock department store for Milan Design Week 2016, or turning his showroom into a fantasy flower shop with gladioli suspended from the ceiling last London Design Festival. Yet by recasting early nineties teen aesthetics as modern decor, Broom may have succeeded in realizing his most ambitious installation yet—one that functions as a time warp, allowing guests to see the evolution of design aesthetics in a whole new light.

Lee Broom will be part of the Shoreditch Design Triangle at Electra House, 95 Rivington Street, London, EC2A 3AY, from September 21 to September 25.

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