Christopher Boots

The brief: "Moody, original, unexpected, full of character." Delivered in spades by dining room and feline alike.

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Interior Design: Melanie Turner Interiors
Project: Hyde Park
Location: Tampa, Florida
Photographer: Mali Azima
Lighting: NEPENTHES

INTO PLACE

The final moments before our lighting pieces become part of the architecture.

Many conversations, design decisions and weeks in the hands of our artisans lead here. But the work only becomes wholly itself when it arrives where it belongs.

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Image 1: NEPENTHES purse meets its clasp
Image 2: Custom PROMETHEUS arrangement, suspended and wrapped
Image 3: ORACLE final unwrapping
Image 4: PROMETHEUS final touches
Image 5: Custom STALACTITE final fastening
Image 6: Custom STALACTITE & PROMETHEUS arrangement, suspended and wrapped

Image 1 photographer: George Downing
Images 2, 4, 5 & 6 photographer: Matthew McQuiggan
Image 3 captured by: SIRAP

HOLDING LIGHT

Recently, we invited a small group of guests to meet PETRA in its most elemental form: quartz slices, in hand, raised to the light. A means to encounter the material intimately, feeling its weight, watching translucency and colour shift from piece to piece, tracing veining that never repeats.

Every slice transmits light differently, because no two ever formed the same way. This variation is fundamental to PETRA. We intervene only where necessary, just enough to give the stone the setting it deserves.

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Photographer: Guy Lavoipierre

Image 1: Interactive quartz slice display
Image 2: Rose quartz slice, held to the light
Image 3: Smoky quartz slice, held to daylight
Image 4: PETRA III in rose quartz, detail
Image 5: PETRA III in rose quartz, in situ

CASSINA TOKYO

Two ways of thinking in brass & light, now on view in Cassina IXC, Tokyo.

ORACLE unfolds in luminous, interlocking arcs, while ABACUS casts a measured line through the adjoining space.

EARTH AND EMBER

Pepperberry is a room of earth, curve and light.

Rammed earth walls, natural finishes and vaulted curves create a retreat that feels both contemporary and reassuringly ancient.

Set within it, PETRA I in smoky quartz becomes a continuation: raw, unprocessed stone, illuminated from within, softening into something closer to embers than electricity as the day fades.

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Project: Pepperberry at Temple Farmhouse, Nashua, Australia
Photographer: Jessica Aleece
Lighting: PETRA I Sconce in Smoky Quartz

BEACHSIDE RETREAT

PHASMIDA introduces an organic counterpoint to the home's orderly architectural rhythm.

Suspended within the open living & dining space, the pair establish sculptural focal points, their branching silhouette echoing the trees and coastline beyond.

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Project: Beachside Retreat by Christian Anderson Architects. Omaha, New Zealand.
Photographer: Thomas Cannings
Lighting: PHASMIDA

DANGER & BEAUTY

The pitcher plant is nature at its most seductive. Sweet-scented, glistening, and lined with nectar. Insects follow the shine in. Few climb back out.

NEPENTHES follows the plant's logic. Hand-blown glass hangs soft and amorphous, inviting and alive with light. Solid brass tendrils hold it in suspension; hard, exact, geometric.

Danger dressed as beauty. Worked in brass and glass instead of leaf and nectar.

Named for the mythical potion said to dissolve all sorrow, NEPENTHES is nature's engineering, reclaimed for interior space.

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Image 1: NEPENTHES Sconce
Image 2: Custom NEPENTHES Complex in Polished Brass for CLD Interiors. Photographer: Anson Smart
Image 3: NEPENTHES Sconce. Photographer: Matthew McQuiggan
Image 4: NEPENTHES and Nepenthes. Photographer: Guy Lavoipierre
Image 5: Nepenthes (left) and NEPENTHES (right). Photographer: Matthew McQuiggan
Image 6: NEPENTHES Sconce. Photographer: Matthew McQuiggan
Image 7: Custom NEPENTHES Tendrils in Brushed Brass for MAEK. Photographer: Traianos Pakioufakis

MIDYEAR

Directly beneath, gazing upwards.

A fitting perspective at the year's midpoint: a moment suspended between reflection and projection, recalibration and emergence.

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Image 1: PHASMIDA at Projekt 3488
Image 2: OURANOS photographed by DMC Electrical & Data
Image 3: THEIA photographed by Guy Lavoipierre
Image 4: DIAMOND RING photographed by Dorothee Junkin
Image 5: PROMETHEUS I photographed by Luke Sandberg

QUIET IMPACT

In this Sydney apartment, Alexandra Brown approached lighting as fundamental to the overall architectural experience, and central to fulfilling the clients’ brief.

The Elizabeth Bay project was designed for a couple with opposing instincts, one drawn to colour and decoration, the other to restraint. The dining room is where those two ideas meet.

“Lighting was considered as an integral part of the architectural experience rather than simply a functional necessity. The PETRA pendant was selected to introduce a sculptural focal point within the dining room, with the soft rose quartz bringing a subtle blush tone that adds warmth, femininity and another layer of material richness to the otherwise restrained palette. It reads as a piece of functional sculpture, anchoring the space with quiet impact.”
— Alexandra Brown

Elizabeth Bay Residence by Alexandra Brown Interiors, as featured recently in Vogue Living.

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Photographer: Dave Wheeler
Styling: Joseph Gardner
Lighting: PETRA II, Rose Quartz

FIELD OF VIEW

For two weeks in May, ASTROLABE transformed the Christopher Boots studio into an immersive retrospective spanning fifteen years of work, process and experimentation.

For Melbourne Design Week, the workspace became a living archive: prototypes, casting experiments, material studies, moving image, printed media and completed pieces gathered within the place they were created.

A rare moment where objects, process and history could be experienced together.

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Photographer: Guy Lavoipierre

SOLSTICE

The old form must dissolve before it can be reborn anew.
Light must reach its weakest point before it can strengthen again.

Here in the Southern Hemisphere, tonight is the longest night of the year. From here, the Sun only grows stronger.
Darkness is the stage before light's return.

Meanwhile, the Northern Hemisphere basks in its longest day; its own seasonal apex, before the gradual shift back toward dark.

Two hemispheres, opposite ends of the same cycle of dissolution and return.

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Image: Rosarium Philosophorum, Czech translation by Jaroš Griemiller, Prague, c. 1578

BY HAND

The work begins long before a piece reaches a Cartier boutique. It begins with raw materials; crystal in its unprocessed, irregular state. The stone's natural variation resists automation and efficiency, requiring the meticulous eye and hand of a skilled artisan to bring it to life.

This handcraft underpins our working relationship with Cartier, which now spans ten boutiques across the globe. For a maison defined by precision and material truth, choosing a relatively small Melbourne studio says something about what they value: craft and enduring form, always.

Cartier's Winter Masterpieces exhibition, on now at the National Gallery of Victoria, is a study in timelessness and the enduring cultural value of heirloom objects. Across jewellery, objects and architecture alike, there is a shared belief that craftsmanship still matters; that the things made slowly and carefully are often the things whose value remains.



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Image 1: Final polish on custom Cartier STALACTITE rods
Image 2: Material selection for PETRA
Image 3: Fastening quartz slices on PETRA
Image 4: Crystal composition on STALACTITE
Image 5: Crystal points prepared for assembly
Image 6: Crystal composition on PROMETHEUS
Image 7: Fastening custom Cartier STALACTITE rods
Image 8: Fastening quartz slices on PETRA

Photography: Guy Lavoipierre and Matthew McQuiggan