We are delighted to announce that our joint venture with Chesney’s will be officially launched in London on the 6th June.  Chesney are producing five mantelpieces to Lutyens’s designs with our help and collaboration.  We would like to invite our readers in London on that date to attend a celebration of this event.  Chinese canapés will be served in honour of their recent opening of showrooms in Beijing and Shanghai.  Both Candia Lutyens and Paul Peterson will be in attendance and look forward to meeting our readers plus clients past and present in person.  Lutyens Furniture & Lighting will be giving a donation to the Lutyens Trust for every mantle sold either through us directly or through Chesney’s.  For our US clients, a similar event is planned in New York for the autumn and we will announce the date as soon as we have it.

Please join us on:
Thursday 6th June
6:00pm ~ 8:30pm

Chesney’s
194~202 Battersea Park Road
London SW11 4ND

RSVP Tanya, Hannah or Rebecca at Parker Hobart on 020 7584 1744 or chesneys@parkerhobart.com

Two of our most popular lighting products are our Cardinal Hat lights and our Concentric Hoop chandelier.  Recently we were tasked with coming up with some ideas as how they might be used in tandem with the results in the following sketches.  The second sketch employs the Cardinal Hat sconce.  We enjoy exploring new permutations and are never afraid to develop tried and tested designs in new ways.

Our relationship with Fortuny in New York is continuing to develop apace and we will be introducing Cardinal Hat pendants into their showroom in the coming weeks.  In order to make room for new product in the showroom, the Concentric Hoop light that is there, (exactly as illustrated right) is being sold on special offer.  Please email maury@fortuny.com for details.  This offer is only open to our US clients due to the wiring of the fixture.
Last month we suggested that we were developing new lighting product from some of the Lutyens street lights seen in New Delhi.  Here now are the Delhi lights with our own renditions of how they could look.  Both designs were very well received during a round of visits to decorators and designers in New York.  Both could easily be adapted to be wall sconces and both would work equally well indoors and out.

The Napoloen Chair is always popular due to its comfort and its timeless iconic style.  We thought it would be fun to show some rather more unusual images of it in the context of art.  Above right is a photo of the painter William Nicholson, a great friend of Lutyens, leaning against his own Napoleon Chair.  Nicholson was a painter of some repute and his painting of “Miss Jekyll’s boots” (she refused to sit for him as she considered it a waste of daylight, better used for gardening so he painted her boots instead) was given to Edwin Lutyens and was in turn given to London’s Tate Gallery by his widow.  Above left is Robert Lutyens’s 1956 portrait of Lee Bouvier, (younger sister of Jackie Kennedy) clearly seated in the chair.    Between them is the Edwin Napoleon in his original black horsehair fabric.   Robert Lutyens, designed his own later version of the Napoleon Chair (below right) which follows the same theme but is larger all round and generally more “clubbable”.  Also featured in this image is the Delhi Mercury Ball lantern and another painting of Robert’s above the fireplace. More of Robert’s furniture designs can be found on our “Hotspot” on the home page of our website.

Whilst on the subject of the Napoleon chairs – Edwin and Robert – we are delighted to let our American friends and readers know that we are now in a position to manufacture our entire upholstered product range in the US.  We will be working with a superb upholsterer in whom we have the greatest confidence that our stringent quality requirements will be met and our copyright strictly monitored.

This will have the great advantage of eliminating the trans-Atlantic shipping cost and import duties, which may, in the past, have posed something of an impediment.

Coming very soon, a Lutyens Furniture & Lighting App for your smartphones and tablets.  More in the next edition of this newsletter.

- Candia Lutyens