That’s credit to Barbara Corti, who has been the creative director of Flos since last fall. She’s doing a phenomenal job — she works incredibly hard and she’s very talented. Plus, the engineering to get all those lights hung is just awesome. Filling a room with mirrors isn’t easy, either. In the olden days, people didn’t walk into mirrors. Now, because people are looking at their phones and not where they’re going, you almost need to have air bags on mirrors. But the layout of that space is intuitive.

Well, it’s also been 20 years this year since we first reached out to Flos. We didn’t launch our first product together — Tab lamp — until 2007, but our initial meeting with them was 20 years ago. Everything seems to now be like 20-, or 25-year anniversaries for us. I’m starting to feel like the oldest designer in Milan. But not yet. I reckon I’ve still got another 30 years to go, judging by the past.

It’s a funny feeling, being in this sort of age. I feel compelled to try to help out the young ones. Not to offer aesthetic advice, but just to share experiences and say, “Don’t do that.” The biggest fallacy in our industry is that you have to be a tortured soul to be creative, and money isn’t important. That’s fine if you’re a tortured soul from an affluent family, but otherwise one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that commerce is a creative enterprise. People don’t like talking about commerce, but the reality is that you can’t have creativity without it.

Yes, the portable Bellhop sells super well. Part of that’s because the quality of light around it is beautiful. It builds an atmosphere. It all started off with the simple idea of “Wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to recreate the candle you walk around the house with?” This was around the same time, I suppose, that everyone suddenly had a $1,000 torch on their phone, but it’s not the same.

There were two things, really, behind this latest extension. First, we figured out through experimentation that there was a real opportunity to do something with this form. Rather than creating a small atmospheric area of intimacy, we wanted to create something that is more gregarious and can really fill the room. And the second thing was that part of the success of Bellhop has also been the fact that it’s an entry-level product. People can have some Flos for Christmas, rather than needing to own stocks to buy a lamp. So we decided to make these new lights on the basis that the products be simple enough to still be affordable.

We tried for a $1,000 retail price, including tax, to be the ceiling. In the end, some of them will be less and some of them will be a bit more. But I’ve loved that process. When you work with some manufacturers, you’ll say “Here’s a sketch” and they’ll say “We love it, let’s make it” but then no one buys it because it costs a million bucks. Instead, everyone just goes, “God, isn’t design beautiful?” It might look really good on Instagram. But the reality is, what is it? Is it really a design? It’s a statement of form.

Maybe that’s more of an object for a gallery, and that has a place — we make those as well. But with this collection, we wanted to create something that had fantastic light output, and that is not a challenging archetype. It’s very familiar. It’s borrowed from the portable Bellhop, but we also brought in hanging lamps from the past to study and draw from. They are designs that people can place anywhere — in any home.

We wanted to use components that, should they ever break, will be easy to fix. We’re getting out of that generation of objects that have a fixed LED array and when that goes, you chuck the thing out. Instead, we’ve designed these lights to have light bulbs. After 30,000 hours, you just buy a new bulb.

Our first project with Flos — the Tab — was originally a halogen lamp. Lighting at that point, you could use a bulb from the ‘60s or whenever. And then around 2010, the whole world switched to LED. At first, that was the era of gross blue light bulbs everywhere — you suddenly wanted to die in an Italian restaurant that you’d spent years loving all because of the glow of the light. We fixed that, but we got to a point where lights were no longer a home product — they were a technology product with obsolescence. It’s such a contradiction to save a few watts, but then need to discard something that used kilowatts of energy in its production process.

We’re overcoming that by acknowledging it. Plus, a light bulb is cheaper than an integrated LED array, so that brings the price point down, too. And even though these are using light bulbs, the light quality is really good. The pendant has a hole in the bottom, not only so that you can easily change the bulb, but principally, so that you get a perfect glow for a dining room or kitchen. 

It feels like a lot of designers have done less — like everyone’s just taking a breath. I know there’s a push among some people for a more biennale-type thing, and I’d be over the moon about that. Right now, manufacturers are in a position of needing novelties every year but it’s too much stuff, and we’re in a world where we ought to be reappraising classics. This Bellhop Glass stuff is not world-changing design — it really isn’t. It’s just reliably nice stuff that you can enjoy for 20 years and then sell, make some money back, and it will still be fine for the next person. Or give it to your kids.

Really, let’s just make stuff that people can carry with them, or trade, or call dibs on. I think to that accessibility point, the low or mid-tier market people are producing really nice design stuff — it just doesn’t last. And it wears the shit out of me that people are buying into this thinking it’s design and then it lets them down after two years. It’s depressing. I’d much rather people bought second hand stuff, and then saved up for that one thing that they fall in love with. It’s like fashion — don’t buy cheap fashion. Go to the vintage market and if you absolutely love something from Comme Des Garçons, save up for it and ask everybody you know to buy it for you for Christmas.

Well, people have to pay their mortgages and put breakfast on the table for their kids in the morning. A manufacturer comes to you, and they’ve got a really sweet little shop outside Milan, and they’ve got eight guys working there and it’s not going well. And you think, “Design is their salvation.” That’s our responsibility, isn’t it? I always feel that duty to the manufacturer. It’s different if you’re working for a brand that’s just shipping stuff out, but a lot of the people we work for are makers. And I don’t want them to lose their jobs, so I want to do good work. But the contradiction is that more stuff is made. I don’t know — I think about it all the time.

After I finish at the fair this afternoon, we’re going to explore the metalworking region of Italy to meet these people that I’m talking about — the guys in blue overalls who are machining stuff — to see what’s possible. I think it’s vital that Italy keeps that because we’ve lost so much of it in the U.K. and shifted almost completely to a service industry. It’s a great shame that we don’t have the same level of manufacturing that Italy — or Germany, or France —has. Britain sold it off in the ’80s and ’90s. Whereas Italy has consistently cultivated this image as the craftsman of Europe — and it’s authentic.

We’re in a world where technology is removing the need for so many physical things. It’s a funny time to be creating. I don’t know if kids even want to do design anymore. In the past 20 years, a lot of people who might have gone into design have surely gone into tech — app design or gaming, so that’s interesting.

In a few years, super-A.I. is going to be this higher power that puts us at the intersection of technology and theology. Beyond that, the future of technology is biology. As it gets smaller and smaller, it’s going to become much more akin to cellular structures. And whether it’s physically hardware or something that we think of as more like tissue, it will become something — something optional — where if you want to know everything, you can. 

I am interested in understanding what’s happening in that world. It’s a basic survival mechanism. Growing up without money, I’ve always had to hedge my bets. It’s why Ed and I run three firms [in addition to Barber Osgerby, the pair also lead the architecture and interiors firm Universal Design Studio, plus MAP, a consulting agency that advises clients on the relationship between technology and objects] — to be resilient to downturns in the economy. And because the diversity keeps you alive. Otherwise, I’d go nuts.