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UPWARDLY MOBILE Industrial designer Kristofer Laméy crafts ethereal works like this LED ladder from new and old parts in his Castleberry Hill loft-cum-studio.

Kristofer Laméy shows off 
edgy, Machine Age works 
this fall at MODA

He likes Japanese swordplay, motorcycles and spear fishing. He also likes guns, aiki-jujutsu (he’s a black belt), and the biscuits his wife bakes when they return home with 20 friends at 3am. It’s a lifestyle that he sums up as “gypsy luxury.” Allows his wife Jenna, 27, “Our life, it’s not ordinary.”

“Gypsy luxury” is also the aesthetic that industrial design artist Kristofer Laméy applies to his Castleberry Hill loft/studio, which boasts a climbing rope and 
fireman’s pole that Laméy regularly 
climbs and descends. It’s here that 
he conceives and assembles his
 ambitious work: modern blown-glass
light fixtures, whose baroque origins seem at once deep-sea and 
extraterrestrial; sleek, angled, wooden
 coffee tables, which debuted in 2007 at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York; and remnants of his “Ladders” installation project, captured by Los Angeles photographer Matt Odom—the LED-lit glass ladders glowing with
 ghostly, metaphoric brilliance among the tombstones of Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery.

Laméy’s charged, poetically engineered sculptures are now coveted by collectors around the U.S. and overseas. Clients include Frederic Got, a gallery owner in Paris, where Laméy travels frequently for inspiration, and Besharat Gallery, Atlanta, where he designed illuminated glass floor-to-ceiling columns. Up next: A collection of Laméy’s limited-edition work will be shown throughout the month of October in a solo show at the Museum of Design Atlanta (404.979.6455).

The intensely likeable, hyper-verbal 32-year-old arrived at this artistic moment unconventionally. As a kid, he loved to take apart toys and put them back together; as he grew older, he reassembled yard sale TVs and VCRs. Those innards remain his Proustian madeleines.

“The smell of a circuit board still brings me back,” he says. He later worked for Atlanta architect Karel Pruner and helped design the upscale lighting for the Buckhead restaurant Twist. Now on his own, he designs his visions on a computer, with a half-dozen friends building the parts to his exacting specifications. Laméy then assembles them in his living room.

He married Jenna two years ago. Seventy friends were invited one night to Besharat Gallery to debate whether the two should marry. An hour later, without Jenna knowing in advance, Laméy popped the question. When she said yes, he signaled for a preacher and the two were united on the spot.

Now, examples of Laméy’s work—a many-tentacled glass chandelier and edge-lit glass from his “Ladders” series—share loft space with his year-and-a-half-old son’s vintage Radio Flyer race car and Jenna’s gleaming Ducati motorcycle. The couple is still trying to reconfigure the loft to accommodate a new daughter. But they’re not too worried. Laméy says they have a mantra for times like these: “Let’s get uncomfortable.”
Tags: Style, Art, Besherat Gallery, International Contemporary Furniture Fair, Kristofer Lamey, Ladders, Matt Odom, MoDA, Museum of Design Atlanta

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