Spotlight: Meet Adam Hoets From Willowlamp

When it comes to creative lighting design, we have carefully followed the industry success of local brand Willowlamp. Today we chat to founder Adam Hoets about the importance of lighting in your next project and what trends we can expect to see in the seasons to come.

What is your background and how did you decide that you wanted to move into decorative lighting?

Growing up with an artisan, namely, my father, Digby Hoets, certainly had a huge influence on the way I learned to see the world. My father is a renowned South African potter and teacher of pottery, well known for making large pots and often in related groupings. This gave me an appreciation for hand-made functional art forms made from high-quality ingredients.

This appreciation for shape, form, and design, led me to study and practice architecture, during which time, my leaning towards biomorphism surfaced and I felt drawn to express nature-inspired form in all aspects of my work.

This expression appeared in the outward architecture of the buildings I designed and also in the interior design where I enjoyed creating organic inspired structures that were both beautiful and functional.

Through this practice, my appreciation for light and how this could transform the experience of space entirely, heightened. I began to focus more and more on light and how to cast light in ways inspired by nature using nature-inspired objects such as the branches of trees, the spines of cone shells, flowers, and more.

This fascination with sculpting the casting of light using beautiful objects drew me to laser cutting frames using templates from sacred geometry and using curtains of metal ball chain.

What makes light a tricky medium to work with?

To create a truly exceptional design, attention to detail is sacred. When it comes to lighting, there must be a harmonious integration of the form, quality of light, and the functionality of the piece with simultaneous consideration to the space it is illuminating in terms of the overall architectural aesthetic.

What makes light magical to you?

Light brings life to a space. Everything we see is rendered in light and without light there is nothing. You can take a very average architectural space and totally transform it into something magical by the careful consideration of the interplay of light and form to create a space that feels alive and filled with movement. Sadly, we see the opposite too often with incredible architectural spaces that feel mediocre, sterile, and dead due to the lack of consideration towards the impact of lighting, both in terms of the design and the quality and placement of light.

How are newer elements like LED lighting bulbs impacting your lighting designs?

As with everything, there are positives and negatives. LEDs open up a huge volume of design possibilities. Light can be introduced in completely new ways such as edge or strip lighting, allowing wider freedom and scope for design creativity.

However, there are some drawbacks, for instance, dimming is still an issue even with most dimmable LEDs. When we dim halogen lamps, the light is warmer and richer. This welcoming incandescence is lost with most dimming LEDs and especially with some of the smaller bulbs used in decorative fittings whereby the light may dim but the colour remains the same and loses some of the natural glowing dynamism that halogen lamps deliver in terms of atmosphere. One of the first challenges for us was that we had many collections that were designed around halogen lamps. Fortunately, the technology of LEDs has come a far way and we offer all of our original designs in both halogen and high-quality LEDs. Many of our newer designs are designed specifically for the atmosphere and quality of LED lights, keeping both their lighting effects and functional capabilities in mind.

What are your favourite current collections?

Our tree and mandala collections will always be firm favourites but I’m also very excited about our new collection of wall sconces, particularly for smaller spaces. We’ve become so accustomed to being outdoors during this pandemic, we’ve started to yearn for more nature in our home spaces. Placing our protea wall sconces on either side of a bed, for example, or in a living room or passage, can free up space, bring nature indoors and create a beautiful, artful ambiance that soothes and delights. The power of light to expand spaces has always inspired me and our wall sconces celebrate light’s ability to do just that.

What other lighting trends are you seeing in lighting design?

My personal design philosophy is that if you are going to create anything it should always be timeless. The most beautiful things, the things we appreciate the most, are always timeless. They are dependable and our relationship with these things deepens and evolves over time and never seems to date, they have a way of remaining current. To me, that is a signature of excellence and a true test of whether something is extraordinary or not.

Your lighting design work requires an even balance of technical expertise and artistic flair how do you combine these two elements?

Fortunately, the combination of my upbringing and natural creativity and my background as an architect gave me the perfect skill set and a foot in both worlds. My love of lighting is born from the marriage of these distinct but inseparable disciplines– art and design as well as structure and technology.

What lighting designs annoy you?

Balls on sticks. How boring?!