KNITTED LAMPS BY STUDIO MEIKE HARDE

Soft textile lamps (and more) from a young German designer

Meike Harde is a twenty-six-year-old designer based in Saarbrücken, Germany. After graduating from HBK Saar in 2011 and following a prestigious internship with Studio Benjamin Hubert, the designer founded her own studio in 2013. We had previously spotted her London Collection and been enchanted by the unabashedly feminine design, so we were excited to check out her latest creations at Milan Design Week.

In Milan, we were (admittedly) pleased to see that Harde’s latest designs kept a similar girly aesthetic. Her Knitted Lamps are particularly sweet with their distinctive softness that almost encourages the user to touch and interact with the material, creating a different relationship than with traditional lamps.

Using a knitted fabric on an acrylic frame, the lamps imitate and imply the structure of a lamp while playing with transparency and challenging our conventional standards for materials.

In addition to the Knit Lamps, Harde also added an interesting alternative to traditional upholstery techniques with her Armchair. The foam cushion is not attached to the frame, but rather held in place by overlapped fabric.

And her Hybrid Cabinet uses woven wire to provide a showcase or cabinet that is both flexible and strong. It also nicely mirrors the transparence of the Knitted Lamps, drawing the pieces together.