Lighting and Furniture Trends 2020

This is just a brief update on trends I'm seeing come in this year. As well as designing and producing my own products I am a lighting design consultant. I regularly work with architects and interior designers and I pick up on trends a lot of them seem to be incorporating into their designs.Firstly black is back! Well sort of.I've mentioned before in a previous post that metal finishes like brass and copper are very popular, especially in detailing. This is nothing new but recently I was asked for a 'blackened brass' finish on my lacrimosa pendants by a very successful design practice in Beverly Hills. I've also come across this finish used extensively in a high end bespoke Hotel project in London which I am working on as a consultant.Its not a finish I had supplied before so I set about researching it. It turns out there are quite a few ways to achieve a 'blackened metal' finish. On a mass production scale a 'smoked' lacquer is simply applied to the metal and often given a 'faux' brushed finish. This is certainly what I've come across on lower cost products. On the other hand there's aged metal that has oxidized and blackened over time and then been polished up. Then there is metal that is blackened using a chemical process, I'm fairly sure this is just a way of speeding up the oxidization. I didn't want to go down the smoked lacquer route and I didn't have a few decades to wait for the metal to oxidize so I took the chemical option. Here is an image of the finished product:The necks of these pendants are actually brass that has been chemically treated to turn a lovely metallic black with very subtle hints of blue and dark green in a slight patina.Its quite an understated finish which creates a more subtle opulence than the bright polished or brushed brass and copper that has been so popular.After all that talk of black I think I should talk about some colour! I've seen a lot of Emerald Green, Ocean Blues and dusky pinks used in furnishings recently. Quite bold colour choices, but in the right interior they can look stunning. So to that end I went about creating some of my lacrimosa pendants in those colours as limited editions.The exact colours used here are from the Dulux range: Oxford Blue, Emerald Green and Ballarina Dance. All these colours work very well with the brushed brass necks and would add a splash of colour to any room!