Lee Broom’s Kaleidoscopia Turned 17 Lights Into 200

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 10 min

Seventeen lights and two mirrors, arranged on black carpet in a Shoreditch showroom, read to the eye as more than two hundred. For London Design Festival 2019, Lee Broom did not build a bigger installation than his Orion lights could support; he built a smaller one and let reflection do the rest. Kaleidoscopia is the clearest demonstration in his career of a principle that runs through everything he has staged since: the effect has to be theatrical, but the means can stay honest.

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From 17 to 22 September 2019, Lee Broom converted his own showroom on Rivington Street, in Shoreditch, into an installation called Kaleidoscopia, presented as part of the Shoreditch Design Triangle during London Design Festival. The showroom’s usual retail floor was cleared and laid with black carpet. Two large mirrors were positioned against the walls. Seventeen individual fittings from Broom’s Orion lighting collection, in both its Tube and Globe forms, were suspended from the ceiling, arranged in vertical pillars and horizontal rays reaching out from a central point. The combination of lights and reflections produced the appearance of a single vast chandelier, assembled from what looked like well over two hundred points of light, accompanied by a slow electronic soundtrack that gave the room a processional quality.

The installation belongs to a specific moment in Broom’s career. By 2019 he was twelve years into running his own studio, well known within the design trade for launching new furniture and lighting each Milan Design Week, but Kaleidoscopia was something narrower and more personal: a demonstration built entirely from his own product line, staged in the building where he actually sells it, timed to the one week of the year when London’s design trade walks past his door. It sits earlier in a run of showroom and public-space transformations that now includes Hail, his 2025 to 2026 stair-void installation at the Mandarin Oriental Mayfair, and Beacon, the touring sculpture that reached Milan’s Piazza San Babila in 2026. Those later pieces work at civic and hospitality scale, with manufacturing partners and multi-city tours behind them. Kaleidoscopia is the same instinct working at showroom scale, with two mirrors standing in for everything a bigger budget would otherwise have to supply.

What was actually built in the showroom

The showroom itself did the heavy lifting before a single light went up. Broom’s Rivington Street premises is a working retail space for most of the year, and for the week of London Design Festival its floor was stripped back to black carpet, which removed the usual visual noise of a shop floor and gave the mirrored walls a dark, continuous field to work against. Two mirrors, positioned to face into the room rather than each other, were the only structural additions beyond the lights themselves.

Onto that stage, Broom hung seventeen fixtures from his Orion collection, in a mixture of the Tube and Globe variants, suspended both vertically as single pendants and horizontally between two points, which is exactly how the Orion system is designed to be used. Arranged this way, the fittings formed pillars rising from the floor and rays radiating outward from a central cluster, rather than the more conventional single-point chandelier the effect eventually suggested. Visitors walking into the room encountered what read as a single, room-filling composition of light, built from a fraction of the fixtures the effect implied.

The mechanism behind the effect

The detail that separates Kaleidoscopia from a simple product display is how plainly Broom described the trick behind it. Asked about the installation at the time, he called it “a fairly uncomplicated design using mirror, black carpet and clever angles,” adding that the “overall effect is very extensive, giving the impression of a super-sized lighting installation.” That is a specific, almost technical account of the mechanism, and it matters because it tells you what the installation is actually arguing.

Two mirrors, angled to catch the suspended lights and each other’s reflections, multiply a fixed number of points of light into repeating chains that recede toward a vanishing point, the same optical principle behind an infinity mirror or a fairground hall of mirrors. Black carpet removes the one surface in the room that would otherwise break the illusion, since a patterned or light-coloured floor reflecting back into the mirrors would read as floor rather than as more lights. The combination turns seventeen physical fixtures into what convincingly reads as a chandelier built from more than two hundred. Broom has described wanting the finished room to feel “imposing yet intimate,” comparing the sensation to approaching a cathedral altar or walking into a hall of mirrors for the first time, and the mechanism is precisely calibrated to produce that specific, disorienting scale.

What is notable is what the installation does not do. It does not add fixtures, materials or budget to manufacture a bigger effect. It multiplies a small, honestly stated set of real objects through optics, and says so, rather than dressing up the illusion as abundance. That is a different kind of design argument to the one Broom would go on to make with Beacon, which achieves its scale through 292 individually cast glass panels rather than through reflection. Kaleidoscopia’s case is that spectacle does not require more material. It requires a more precise arrangement of what is already there.

The Orion light the whole room was built from

Every fixture in Kaleidoscopia came from Broom’s Orion collection, part of the wider Observatory series he launched at Salone del Mobile in Milan in April 2018, shown across a 250 square metre gallery space in the city’s Brera Design District as a seven-piece celestial lighting collection. Orion is a modular system built around two complementary units. The Globe Light pairs a polished metal tube, available in gunmetal or gold finishes, with an illuminated opal glass sphere. The Tube Light reverses the composition: an illuminated tube paired with a polished metal sphere. Both units are designed to be combined in either orientation, suspended as single vertical pendants or hung horizontally between two fixing points, which Broom has described as building “a constellation of light” from a small number of interchangeable parts, a direct reference to the collection’s namesake constellation.

That modularity is what made Kaleidoscopia possible in the first place. A fixed, single-form pendant light could not have been arranged into the pillars and radiating rays the installation needed, because its shape would have dictated one composition. Orion’s tube-and-sphere pairing, reversible and combinable in either axis, gave Broom a set of parts flexible enough to be reconfigured into an entirely different, room-scale object without altering a single fixture’s design. The product and the installation were designed to answer the same brief: a small number of elements capable of reading as many different things depending on how they are arranged.

From theatre school to showroom theatre

Broom’s instinct for turning a retail space into a stage set has a specific origin. He worked as a child actor from the age of six to seventeen, training at theatre school and working with the Royal Shakespeare Company before he ever studied design. At seventeen he won a national fashion competition judged by Vivienne Westwood, which led to an apprenticeship in her studio, and he went on to study fashion at Central Saint Martins rather than furniture or product design. He founded his own studio, under his own name, in 2007.

That background shows up directly in how he treats a showroom. A conventional fashion or theatre training teaches a designer to think about how an audience encounters a composition over time and from a fixed vantage point, rather than only about how an object looks in isolation on a shelf. Kaleidoscopia is a showroom installation built on exactly that logic: visitors did not examine individual Orion fittings one at a time, they walked into a composed scene, built for the specific experience of standing in the middle of it. The soundtrack running through the room reinforces the same point. A retail display does not usually need a score. A piece of theatre does.

A recurring habit, not a one-off stunt

Kaleidoscopia was not an isolated flourish. Two years earlier, for his tenth anniversary at Salone del Mobile in 2017, Broom staged Time Machine inside a derelict vault at Milan’s Milano Centrale station, his largest exhibition to that point, built around a rotating carousel displaying a decade of redesigned pieces in a single new colour palette. That installation used none of Kaleidoscopia’s mirror trick; its transformation came from scale, colour and the drama of an abandoned civic space rather than from optics. The following year, Observatory itself, the collection Orion belongs to, turned a Brera gallery into a celestial showroom for the launch of seven new lighting pieces. By the time Kaleidoscopia opened in Shoreditch in 2019, showroom transformation during a major design week had become a settled part of how Broom operates, with a different technical solution built fresh for each brief rather than a single formula repeated.

That habit has continued well past 2019, at larger and more public scale. Hail, staged in the stair void at the Mandarin Oriental Mayfair from September 2025 into 2026, took the same instinct for a composed visitor experience and applied it to a space nobody moves through at a fixed pace, solving an architectural problem rather than a retail one. Beacon, the touring sculpture that reached Milan’s Piazza San Babila for Milan Design Week 2026, took the same reflex for public spectacle onto the street, built from 292 cast glass panels rather than a mirrored room. Both later works trade Kaleidoscopia’s intimate, showroom-scale illusion for permanent materials and a public audience, but the underlying design habit, reading a space as a stage rather than a container, is the same one on display in Shoreditch in 2019.

Why the Shoreditch Design Triangle mattered

Kaleidoscopia’s timing was as deliberate as its optics. London Design Festival concentrates the design trade’s attention on a small number of neighbourhoods for one week a year, and the Shoreditch Design Triangle, the cluster of showrooms and studios around Rivington Street and Curtain Road, is one of the festival’s established routes for exactly that audience. Staging Kaleidoscopia in his own showroom, rather than at an off-site venue, meant the installation doubled as a functioning shop for the rest of the year, and that the version of the room visitors experienced during the festival was a temporary transformation of a space they could return to see in its ordinary form. That contrast, between the everyday showroom and the week-long illusion built inside it, is part of what made the installation legible as a trick rather than simply as an unusually large lighting display: visitors who knew the room already had a baseline to measure the transformation against.

Final thoughts

It is easy to describe Kaleidoscopia as a light show, a striking display of lighting product timed to a design festival. What actually happened in that Shoreditch showroom is more specific than that. Lee Broom took seventeen fittings from a modular collection he had launched the previous year, added two mirrors and a length of black carpet, and let optics rather than budget do the work of making a small showroom feel like it contained more than two hundred lights.

That is the throughline worth keeping. Broom’s reputation for theatrical showroom transformation is often described only in terms of scale and spectacle, and Kaleidoscopia is the clearest evidence that the scale is a result rather than the method. The installation he staged in 2019, and the ones he has staged since, from a rotating carousel in a derelict Milan station vault to a stair void solved through reeded glass to a touring sculpture built from a factory’s own waste, all share the same working principle: identify the exact mechanism that will make a space read as more than it materially is, then build only that mechanism, precisely.

Kaleidoscopia is the smallest and most legible version of that habit on record, because its mechanism, two mirrors and a dark floor, is simple enough to explain in a single sentence and Broom did exactly that. Everything he has built at larger scale since has been the same instinct, worked out with a bigger set of tools.