En Vacances en France

As the title suggests, we have been on hols, in France; but before we left I did manage to get a prototype wall light completed and installed.  So here it is.

wall light - on wall, lit

As you can see, it lights up, and is mounted on the wall, thereby meeting the main design imperatives head on.

It's made of perspex, finished on the front faces with left-over table laminate.  The laminate is stuck on with nice, almost odourless spray-on contact adhesive (as used on the extension leaves of the dining  table), but the perspex is stuck together with a hideous-smelling solvent, sold expressly for the purpose, because most other things don't work as well, and I don't want it falling apart under its own considerable weight.  There are three more layers of perspex behind, and a big hole through the middle with some LED strip inside to do the actual lighting.  The whole thing hooks firmly around a slightly-modified wall plate with a 2.5mm power connector mounted in the middle for the 12V feed.  There are no screws anywhere to interfere with the purity of the concept - what Philippe Starck once called "la violence du design" (ahem!)

The pre-prototype experimental model was deemed insufficiently bright by the lovely Jackie (in her role as fussy client), so I changed it a bit to cram some more LEDs in.  The prototype you see here was then deemed to be excessively bright when seen from the side, so I added some paper tape inside to dampen down the light from the outermost layer.  And in this way we have finally got through type approval, and all that remains is to make some more, when I can be bothered.

wall light, in context

In case you were wondering just how big the thing is, here it is in the context of a dining room:

Of course, all this industry couldn't possibly have been achieved without the creation of a special tool.

poised

In this case it was a router clamp for cutting laminate, seen here clamping (left) with the router poised for action, and opened up for positioning of the laminate (below).  It's made from a bit of MDF and an IKEA cabinet base (and some hinges, and random baulks of timber).

The router runs along the bottom edge of the black bit and cuts to the sides of the slot, as I'm sure you can readily see.

lacking poise

Somewhere along the way we also gave the lovely Jackie's "Dune" table its fourth revamp, by replacing the lacquered wallpaper finish with the same laminate.  I say we, because Jackie did most of the laborious stripping (border adhesive - ugh!).  Here she is, using here favourite tool, the flame-thrower.

The lovely Jackie, stripping

We had enough laminate to do both levels, and we started with the top one.  I cut it roughly to size (with a pretty big margin) and coated both surfaces with contact adhesive, and we offered it up as best we could - which turned out to be wrong by a good inch at the narrow end.  Desperate lifting of the laminate and scraping of the glue ensued, until very near the end, when the lifting force exceeded the strength of the ever-narrowing still-stuck down laminate, and the bloody thing broke!  Very fortunately, the lower level is smaller, and the broken piece was just big enough... Anyway it all turned out well, as you can see in this picture:

Dune table, gloriously reborn (again)

And so, to France!  We went in the camper van, of course, and as luck would have it (some would say planning, but I wouldn't know anything about that) we went to Vannes in the van (ha!), where we rode hired bikes, and drank wine, and ate lots of cheese, and didn't do any watersports at all because it was really rather windy near the water, even in the sheltered Golfe du Morbihan.  After a while we wandered off along the Loire, where we managed to find quite a few lovely gardens, including one in Angers, rather inventively called the "Jardin des Plantes", which featured sculpture amongst the trees.  Here's an example:

untitled sculpture

From the photo, it's a little difficult to see what's going on here, but it's essentially a lion-headed, winged lizard (rampant) with a naked lady sprawled, somewhat provocatively in my opinion, on its back.  I suppose this arrangement might relate to some obscure episode in classic mythology, but the perpetrator didn't seem to have afforded the whole thing a title, so we can't really be sure.  I couldn't help noticing that even the lizard has breasts, though.  Odd.

I was still wondering about the relationship between art (generally created by men) in public spaces and the female form, when we came upon another example of the genre.  As we approached I was thinking an appropriate title might be something like "Save time by doing your hair whilst urinating", but it turned out that this one already had a title: "La Matinée"

Well!  If that's the matinée, I can't help wondering what the evening performance looks like?