Completed project
Villa W10, Doha: cascades of glass, where a chandelier would vanish
In a double-height salon a chandelier gets lost. Here cascades of glass leaves come down, hung at different heights. The light is ours: a volume, not an object.
Project data
In a room twice as tall, a chandelier gets lost
The salon is double height, with glazing rising to the top. A chandelier, however large, becomes a dot in there: the room eats it.
The answer is not to make it bigger, it is to change its nature. The cascades come down vertically for metres, in overlapping leaves, and occupy a volume instead of a point.
Two ages of the same glass, in the same room
Under the dome there is a clear glass candle chandelier of classic form: curved arms, cups, no colour. Around it, the contemporary cascades.
They live together because they are made of the same material and neither is coloured: it is the glass that holds them together, not the style. Mixing two periods works when the matter is one.
Clear, because there are windows behind
An opaque mass hung in front of tall glazing would block it. The leaves are clear glass: from below you see the ceiling through them, and daylight passes between one leaf and the next.
The ceiling also carries a gilded disc, which by day throws a warm reflection back into the cold glass. Day and evening do not get the same chandelier, even though it is the same piece.
Two looks from inside the salon
Seated and lengthways: the cascades change their trade depending on where you look from.
From a seat, the cascade is a low ceiling
From below the perception changes: the leaves fill the upper field and the room gets shorter. It is the only way to make a salon of that height feel close without actually lowering anything.
In a row, they become one thing
Seen lengthways the cascades overlap and read as a continuous front. That is not chance: the spacing between them is decided by looking from where people come in.
First the dimension is drawn, then the glass is blown
A fitting this size is not chosen: it is dimensioned. The construction drawing carries the two heights — 4,670 and 4,370 millimetres — the thousand-millimetre diameter, and a human figure beside them, which is the most honest way of showing a client what they are ordering.
The two cascades are not identical because the ceiling is not flat: thirty centimetres of difference make them finish on the same line, which is the only thing anyone notices from below.
It is assembled in the house, one ribbon at a time
A four-and-a-half-metre cascade does not arrive assembled: it arrives in crates and is composed on the scaffold. The steel ring that carries the whole weight goes up first; then the cables; then the ribbons, hooked on one at a time at set heights.
It is the part of the job that never shows in the finished photographs, and the part where it is decided whether the object will be beautiful: one ribbon out of position is visible from the whole salon, and from the floor you can no longer reach it.
Six looks, from the scaffold to the sofa
Photographs of the installation and of the finished house, September 2018.
Forty centimetres a ribbon
Each blown glass ribbon is forty to forty-five centimetres tall and seven millimetres thick. From below you do not count them: you see a surface that moves.
Against the light, which is the hard case
With a window behind it, a glass fitting risks disappearing. Here the glass is blown and not smooth: the incoming light breaks inside the ribbon instead of passing through.
It comes down to eye level, and that is the point
The cascade reaches the height of someone standing. In a seven-metre salon it is the only way a fitting is seen from a sofa.
Two, and not identical
The two cascades are not the same length: 4.67 metres one, 4.37 the other. The difference follows the ceiling, which is not flat.
And next door, a chandelier from another age
In the adjoining room a gilded arm chandelier: the house did not want a single language, and blown glass sits beside brass without fighting it for the room.
The ring that holds it all
At the ceiling there is a steel ring: the cables drop from it, and the weight of four and a half metres of glass all passes through that disc.
A tall salon is solved with volume, not with size
Send us the section and the clear height: we come back with how far it drops, what it weighs and how it fixes.