Lee Broom Builds a Room From a Single Cube of Light

Lighting · London

Reading time: 9 min

In 1886 a Swiss architect called Gustave Falconnier patented a glass brick that was blown in a mould like a bottle, made in four shapes with quarter, half and three quarter sizes so a bricklayer could fit it to any opening. Industry later pressed the glass block flat and turned it into a commodity. At London Design Festival this month, in a showroom on Rivington Street, Lee Broom quietly handed it back.

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I stood in it for a while before I understood what I was looking at. The Chant Chambers ran the length of Lee Broom’s Shoreditch showroom as a single corridor of light, a continuous composition of illuminated glass cubes stepping away from you front to back, doubled in mirrors at either side so it read as though it carried on past the walls. It is, at first glance, the most beautiful thing I saw at London Design Festival this year. It is also, on a second look, a quietly radical change in what the product actually is.

Chant is no longer a chandelier. It is a building block. That is not a flourish on my part. It is written into the way the collection is now specified, and once you see it in the product names you cannot unsee it.

The products are named the way a bricklayer places an order

Look at what the pieces are called. Chant in Clear Glass, Gold Finish, 8 x 8 Single Tier. 8 x 8 Two Tier Open. 8 x 8 Three Tier Staggered Open. Chant in Smoked Glass, Bronze Finish, 3 x 8 Single Tier. 1 x 8 Single Tier, custom lengths available. The wall lights are a 3 x 3 and a 1 x 5.

Those are not model names. They are grid counts: how many cubes across, how many deep, how many courses high. It is exactly how you would order glass blocks from a builders’ merchant, and exactly how you would set them out on a drawing. Lee Broom has stopped naming products and started naming quantities of a unit, which is the moment a designed object turns into a system.

The cube itself has not changed much. What has changed is that it is now sold by the course. A three tier chandelier is three stacked rows of the same block. The staggered open version is the same rows pulled apart and offset, which is what a bricklayer would call a broken bond. The single ceiling light is one block on its own, and the portable table lamp is one block with a base under it. One module, from a lamp you can carry to a ceiling composition eight cubes square.

Continuous Chant turns corners, which is the giveaway

The piece that settles the argument is Continuous Chant, offered in frosted glass with a bronze finish and described simply as custom to any configuration and length. In the collection photography it runs along a ceiling, meets a corner and turns through ninety degrees without a break, then runs away down the return wall. Individual sections connect at right angles to make continuous structures.

A chandelier hangs at a point. This does not hang at a point, it runs along a line and negotiates a corner, which is a thing cornices do and lights generally do not. In the Chambers the effect was startling: the composition crossed the whole ceiling and reappeared in the mirrors, so the room read as a fragment of something much larger that happened to have been cut off by the walls. Chant has evolved from a singular lighting design into an architectural lighting system, as Broom puts it, and the corners are where you can prove it.

There is a commercial logic under the poetry and it is worth naming. An interior designer working on a hotel or a restaurant can now light a bar, a corridor, a lift lobby and a guest room from one family, changing only the count and the finish, and arrive at a coherent scheme without repeating a single fitting. That is what a system buys you, and it is what lighting brands spend years trying to build. Chant has got there from the opposite direction, by starting with an object people already wanted and then discovering it was modular all along.

The first glass brick was blown like a bottle

The source material is worth knowing properly, because it makes the return journey much more interesting. Chant began in Divine Inspiration, shown at Milan Design Week in 2022, and took its cue from the architectural glass block: the material of modernist stairwells, late twentieth century bathrooms and a great many shopfronts.

But the glass block did not start industrial. In the late 1880s Gustave Falconnier, a Swiss architect from Nyon, patented a glass brick that was blown in a mould, like a bottle, then sealed airtight with molten glass while still hot so that a partial vacuum formed inside as it cooled. He made them in four shapes, square, lozenge, squashed hexagon and regular hexagon, with three quarter, half and quarter sizes so they could be fitted to a rectangular opening. Hector Guimard used them at Castel Beranger. So did Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier. A set of them sits in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. It was only in the 1930s that the two part fused block was perfected and the glass brick became a pressed, mass produced commodity.

Which is the observation this whole piece rests on. The glass block began as a hand blown object made in a small family of sizes so it could be laid to fit, and Chant is a hand blown object made in a small family of sizes so it can be laid to fit. Everything Lee Broom sells is made by hand in Britain, at his own factory in East London. He has not borrowed the look of the glass block. He has taken it back to the condition it was in before industry got hold of it, and then given it a light inside.

Smoked glass, and what the darker tone does

The collection appears for the first time here in a smoked glass finish, alongside the existing clear and frosted, and in bronze as well as gold. It is the most consequential of the new additions and the hardest to photograph.

Clear glass gives you the whole apparatus: you see the opal globe inside each cube and the ring of the moulding around it, and the object reads as precise and jewel like. Smoked glass withholds most of that. The globe becomes a warm blur suspended in something the colour of weak tea, the reflections in the cube go from bright to oily, and the fitting stops announcing itself. In a room it reads less like a chandelier and more like a light source that happens to be beautiful, which is a different and more usable thing. The reference given is the glamour of late night nineteen seventies interiors, and that is exactly right: it is the tone of a good hotel bar at eleven o’clock. Put the three finishes in one room, as the Chambers did, and you realise they are not variants of a colour so much as three different distances: clear pulls you close to the object, frosted holds you at arm’s length, smoked keeps the whole thing at the other end of the room.

What the Chambers did with mirrors

The installation deserves its own note, because Broom’s exhibitions have always been the argument rather than the wrapper. The showroom was divided into a sequence of distinct but connected chambers by textured vertical screens, so that you moved through concealment and revelation rather than around a display. Wall to wall carpet, wooden panelling, a palette of wood, smoked glass and sculptural stone, and a level of light low enough that the fittings did all the work.

The mirrors were the clever part. Set at the ends and sides of the central axis, they took the continuous composition of cubes and multiplied it into something with no visible end, which is the single best demonstration of the system idea you could stage. You could not tell where the product stopped. At the far end of the run, a three tier cascading Chant chandelier gave the sequence a full stop. A portable lamp sat on a period record player in one of the side chambers, doing more for the seventies reference than any amount of copy could.

Watching Lee Broom build a brand

I have been following this studio for years, and the pleasure of the Chambers was partly the pleasure of continuity. The studio was founded in 2007 and has made over a hundred pieces, all designed by Lee himself and all made by hand in Britain, with more than forty awards including British Designer of the Year and the Queen’s Award for Enterprise. I have written about Beacon in Milan earlier this year, about From Here On Now at 3daysofdesign, and about Hail at the Mandarin Oriental in Mayfair. Each was a complete idea, staged with total conviction, and each looked like a departure at the time.

Seen together they are not departures at all. They are a practice getting steadily more confident about doing less and meaning more. The Chambers is the clearest version of that yet, because the object on show is almost aggressively simple, a cube of glass with a light in it, and the ambition is entirely in what you are now allowed to do with it. That is a harder thing to pull off than a new silhouette, and a much more durable one.

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Final thoughts

What makes the Chant Chambers worth the trip was not that it looked extraordinary, although it did. It was that the idea underneath was so tightly held. A single cube, made by hand, sold by the course, able to run a wall or turn a corner or sit on a side table, and doing all of it without a second form being introduced anywhere. That is discipline of a kind that is much rarer than invention.

Watching this studio evolve over the years has been one of the real pleasures of covering British design, and this felt like a moment where the patience paid. The Chant Chambers was at Lee Broom, 91, 93 and 95 Rivington Street, Shoreditch, London EC2A 3AY, from 15 to 20 September 2026.