The Alchemy of Elegance: Otium

Thomas Fuchs, owner and designer of New York-based lighting and accessories company Otium, is working side-by-side with a maestro in a glass factory in Murano, Italy. Their common objective: pinning down the form for a custom chandelier headed for a Fifth Avenue apartment. The fixture will comprise a cluster of hibiscus flowers with long, leafy tendrils that culminate in three balls resembling dewdrops. The compositional glass will be the thinnest Fuchs has ever produced and it will capture the intrigue born of two paradoxical characteristics-monumentality with fragility.

Oven flames glow in the background. Sheer and luminous, a viscous liquid billows out from the end of the maestro’s long twirling rod, gradually assuming the look of a flower. Extraordinary craftsmanship is involved in the product’s development-the maestro blows, spins, bends, coils and cuts by means of pipe, pincers and rod. Fuchs sent a full-scale drawing for his design to the factory two weeks before his arrival and once the chandelier’s form is ironed out, he will work with the factory’s colorist to develop the particular alchemy that will determine its hues.

The many glass shards he has plucked from the factory’s back rooms evidence the designer’s affinity for this part of the process. “Every time I leave Italy, I have pocketfuls of broken glass, which I use as references,” he says. Fuchs’ color choices tend to be historical ones-he recently resurrected the black glass used for the barware in Mussolini’s limousine, incorporating it into his Pancis Lamp. But he rarely uses color in a straightforward manner. More typically, he layers tones to lend his wares greater depth and richness. In his Egiziano Lamp, for example, two separate dippings result in a product that looks solid red when switched off but reveals amber highlights when illuminated.

Though Fuchs will likely branch out from making glass items in the spring of 2009 to produce a stone line, glass will likely never lose its powerful hold on him.

“It’s pure magic,” says the designer. “It starts off as sand, pigment and ash, and 12 hours later it’s a gorgeous object. As a furniture designer, one rarely experiences immediate gratification. But with glass, because you have to complete your prototype before the glass cools, the result is fairly immediate.”

He relishes the material not only for its ability to refract light and to be either transparent or opaque, but also for the vast range of color and texture options it offers-which is greater than that of any other material he’s worked with in the past, he says.

Fuchs has worked with many. He entered the design arena by way of furniture in 1988 after taking a job in the furniture division of Washington, D.C.-based gallery, C.G. Sloan & Co. After two years, he moved to San Francisco to work as a furniture specialist for Butterfield & Butterfield auction house. By the end of his five-year stint there, he had built up a clientele that wholly trusted his aesthetic and his ability to find what was being sought. He left to become a private dealer but after just a year-and-a-half, one of his clients, interior designer Craig Wright, asked him to come to Los Angeles and help develop a new line of furniture reproductions called Quatrain.

Fuchs brought all his prior experience to bear on this enterprise. “I had spent a great deal of time appraising furniture while working in the auction business,” he says. “That had required a thorough knowledge of styles and construction as well as what was necessary to maintain value or create a fakery. This know-how was invaluable to me in crafting reproductions.”

During the period Fuchs worked on the Quatrain lines, which emphasized the neoclassical and carved designs he loves, he had the opportunity to source and work with great artisans. “It’s an amazing experience to walk into a cabinetmaker’s shop and help him realize his broader potential,” he says. “I had a substantial budget at Quatrain and so could ask craftsmen to use the finest veneers and take the time to do elaborate carving.”

Eventually, Fuchs became homesick for the east coast, and in 1999, moved to New York to work with John Hutton, Donghia’s design director who had been searching for a director of design development capable of sharing both his vision and design sensibility. “I developed more in my first year at Donghia than had been developed there in the prior ten years,” Fuchs says. “We had a fabulous studio in Soho and a fabulous team. I was exposed there to Sherry Hutton’s fabrics group, which was always in rapid design mode and had a lot in the works at all times.”

Hutton’s focus was furniture but Donghia had also just launched a glass line when Fuchs joined the company. “As soon as I arrived, I started developing John’s glass designs and within a year I became the sole designer of the pieces,” he says. And so, it wasn’t much of stretch for him to consider starting his own line of glass products when, in 2004, he decided to leave Donghia.

It’s been four years since Otium launched, and though the name implies an aristocratic type of leisure, Fuchs’ days are not exactly walks in the park. Since the firm’s inception, he has added roughly eight pieces a year to the collection and, in addition, has created five or six custom chandeliers annually. “I just hung a custom chandelier in the makeup department at Bergdorf Goodman’s,” he says. “I made it green to match the edges of all the glass cases.”

My favorite product is the Umbrello lamp from Otium. Inspired by a partially close umbrella, I chose this because of its’ beauty in form and control, but also it includes elements we have no control of directing in manufacturing. I love the tension that occurs in this relationship of the design. In other words, our Maestro in Italy are amazing at creating a fairly uniformed object by hand but, then within the glass are 24kt gold leaf sheets that do not melt into the glass but flows unguided creating a beautiful subtle pattern. There is also an uncontrolled luminosity that occurs when the light is turned on and the 24kt gold leaf flecks are captured in the light. It looks like a tall Champagne glass filled with sparkling bubbles. The complementary products (below) all have the same character in their design that I like about the Umbrello Lamp. Each piece is free form but within the constraint of the design concept. Even those they are all very different items there is a relationship between them that creates an over all unstuffy elegance.

Fuchs now goes to Murano about six times a year and spends a week at a time in the glass factory. When he’s in New York, he rises early to email the factory before it closes, and then conducts business throughout the rest of the day. His creative work-drawing and crafting paper models-is done at night and on weekends.

“It’s a hectic pace but I get no sympathy from my friends for having to travel back and forth to Italy,” he says.

At the moment, a paper facsimile of a new lighting design hangs from the Venetian chandelier that illuminates Fuchs’ own apartment. This model gives him a sense of what the piece will actually look like when it is installed-in a ballroom. Business is going well, conveying a benefit that cuts two ways-he is fortunate that his beautiful designs are seeing the light of day and we are privileged to be living among them.

Check out Otium Following the Light in Decorati’s Founder’s Blog.

Photographs by David Diesing and Thomas Fuchs.