Time Machine: Lee Broom’s Tenth-Anniversary Carousel at Ventura Centrale

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 10 min

For his studio’s tenth anniversary, Lee Broom did not book a gallery. He unsealed a vault. A carousel built at Pinewood Studios turned slowly through a Milan railway vault closed to the public for three decades, carrying a decade of his furniture and lighting reworked in white, while a Carrara marble grandfather clock, cut so that no two editions share a pattern, stood apart in the dark as the show’s single still point. Nothing else in the room was lit.

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Lee Broom turned ten in 2017, and he marked it by building a fairground ride inside a room that had not opened its doors in thirty years. Time Machine, staged at Milan’s Ventura Centrale from 4 to 9 April 2017 during Salone del Mobile, took over a vault beneath Milano Centrale station, a space that had served as a warehouse, laboratory and depot for the station above it before falling out of use altogether. Broom filled it with a single rotating carousel, over six metres wide and more than four metres tall, built by the model makers at Pinewood Studios and carrying roughly thirty pieces from his first decade in design, every one of them reworked in white.

Away from the carousel, at the rear of the 340 square metre vault, stood the object the whole show existed to introduce: a grandfather clock carved from a monolithic block of Carrara marble, its faceted, straight-lined silhouette drawn deliberately from Brutalist architecture rather than from the traditional cabinetry the form usually implies. Ten were made, one for each year of the studio’s life, and because each was cut from its own hand-picked block of stone, no two share the same vein or pattern running through the case.

The pairing is the argument. A carousel is the most literal image of repetition and return that a fairground has to offer, built here from a decade of designs stripped to one colour so their silhouettes, not their finishes, carried the show. The clock, by contrast, measures a decade that does not repeat: ten years, ten stones, ten different patterns frozen inside ten identical forms. Where a conventional tenth-anniversary retrospective would line a showroom with a company’s greatest hits under even light, Broom built a machine that moved through his history while a second, motionless object measured how much of it could never be repeated.

What was actually in the vault

The vault itself did the first half of the work. Ventura Centrale, the newly opened design district that hosted the show, occupied a run of warehouse and depot buildings beneath Milano Centrale, one of Europe’s grandest railway stations, sealed and unused for around three decades before its 2017 conversion into exhibition space. Visitors walked in from the bright, ordinary daylight of a working station concourse and out of it entirely, into a dark, brick-vaulted room with a concrete floor, its raw fabric left untouched. The only light inside came from the carousel itself, which meant the room’s darkness was not a backdrop to the installation. It was part of the mechanism, the same way a cinema has to go dark before the projector does any work.

Onto that darkness, Broom set a carousel that looked, more than one visitor noted at the time, as though it had wandered in from a Kubrick film: a stark, symmetrical, all-white fairground ride revolving slowly under its own light, with sound built into the experience as it turned. Built by the model and set makers at Pinewood Studios, the same UK facility that has built film sets for decades of British cinema, the carousel was not adapted fairground equipment dressed up for a gallery. It was constructed from nothing, to Broom’s specification, exactly as a film set is built to hold a scene rather than to survive being struck and rebuilt somewhere else. That detail matters more than it first appears. Broom trained as a child actor from the age of six to seventeen and went through theatre school before he ever designed a chair, and the instinct to commission a piece of theatrical machinery from a film studio, rather than a fabricator, runs in a straight line back to that training. Few, if any, accounts of Time Machine at the time made that connection explicit. It is there in the choice of maker as much as in the finished object.

Riding the carousel, in white, were around thirty pieces selected from roughly a hundred designs Broom’s studio had produced across its first decade: among them the Bright On Bistro chair from 2008, the Carpetry Console from 2009, the Crystal Bulb pendant from 2012 and the Drunken Side Table from 2015. The Shadow Cabinet, originally finished in American walnut with brushed brass detailing, reappeared for the show in a two-tone white, satin lacquer on one faceted side and matte on the other, a change that had nothing to do with the underlying cabinet and everything to do with how a single colour could still register two different surfaces under the carousel’s own light. Stripping ten years of finishes down to one palette was not decoration. It let the show read as a single continuous silhouette, rather than as ten years of separate product photography lined up in a row.

The clock built against its own tradition

The Time Machine clock was the exhibition’s one genuinely new object, rather than a white-lacquered revival, and Broom has been specific about where its form came from. “It was important for me to create something contemporary that was very opposite to the traditionalism usually associated with grandfather clocks,” he said at the time, “so I started to look at a more modernist silhouette, creating very faceted angles and straight lines, similar to that of Brutalist architecture.” The result is a case built from sharp, planar facets rather than the turned and panelled cabinetry a grandfather clock usually wears, a shape closer to poured concrete than to traditional joinery even though the material is solid, hand-carved marble.

The mechanism inside is a genuine departure from the form it is styled against. A traditional longcase clock runs on two separate weights, one for the timekeeping train and one for the strike; Broom’s runs on a single central weight instead, chosen specifically to sit true within the case’s faceted, asymmetric inner chamber rather than to preserve a convention his design had already abandoned. The weight itself is a polished, triangular prism of solid brass, paired with a spherical brass pendulum, so the clock pairs two contrasting geometries, one faceted and angular, one perfectly round, inside a single case. Broom has traced the idea back to his own childhood, recalling a grandfather clock in his grandparents’ home that struck him as “statuesque and oversized and imposing,” and building a version of that same presence in a register that owed nothing to period reproduction.

Ten clocks were made, each carved from its own block of Carrara marble hand-selected at the quarry, so that, in Broom’s words, no two display the same pattern running through the stone. That is a different kind of limited edition to the white-lacquered furniture riding the carousel a few metres away, where a run of ten meant ten identical objects. Here, a run of ten meant ten related but individually unrepeatable ones, each carrying the specific mineral history of the block it was cut from. Set at the still centre of a room built around motion and repetition, that was the clearest way the show had of saying an anniversary is not the same thing as a loop.

Ten years, staged as an argument rather than a list

Lee Broom did not train as a furniture or lighting designer in the conventional sense. He spent his childhood as a working actor, then went through theatre school and won a fashion design competition at seventeen judged by Vivienne Westwood, who took him into her own studio for what became a ten-month apprenticeship. A fashion design degree at Central Saint Martins followed, and only after that did Broom move into interiors and, eventually, the furniture and lighting that built his name. He founded his own studio in London in 2007, meaning Time Machine’s April 2017 staging landed on the studio’s actual tenth birthday rather than an approximate one.

That background is the reason Time Machine behaved like a runway show rather than a trade stand. A fashion house marking an anniversary does not typically hang its archive on a rail under gallery lighting; it restages the archive as a single, choreographed presentation with a beginning, a build and a held final image. Broom applied exactly that structure to furniture and lighting: a route from daylight into darkness, a slow-turning carousel doing the work a runway usually does, and one held, motionless object at the end of the sequence carrying all the weight a show’s closing look usually carries. The theatrical training that took him from a children’s stage to Central Saint Martins is the same training that made a decade of product design legible as a single performance rather than a static retrospective.

Milan’s Ventura Centrale gave that performance a setting no purpose-built stand could have matched. The district’s organisers had spent roughly two years searching for a location that could sit alongside the established Fuorisalone circuit at Ventura Lambrate, and settled on the disused warehouse space beneath Milano Centrale specifically because, as its founder put it at the time, it combined the working energy of one of Europe’s busiest stations with the atmosphere of a genuinely abandoned building. Milano Centrale itself, opened in 1931 and built on a monumental scale that blends Liberty and Art Deco detailing across a vast steel-vaulted concourse, is one of the largest and most architecturally ambitious railway stations in Europe. A vault that had sat sealed beneath it for three decades, never open to the public before 2017, gave Broom a room with more inherent drama than any conventional exhibition hall could rent out. Of everything shown across the newly opened Ventura Centrale that week, Time Machine was reported to have drawn the longest queues of any single installation, a measure less of novelty than of how effectively the vault itself had been put to work.

Time Machine was not the only staging Broom built that same design week. Elsewhere in Milan, his studio also unveiled Observatory, an entirely separate lighting collection built around four astronomical phenomena, a launch that belongs to the following year’s Milan Design Week rather than to Time Machine’s anniversary story, but which shows the same instinct for staging a collection as a single conceptual event rather than a catalogue drop. Read the full story of Observatory.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to read Time Machine as a well-produced birthday party: white furniture on a fairground ride, a handsome marble clock, ten years neatly summarised in one dark room. That reading is not wrong, but it stops short of what the show actually did. Broom took the two things a tenth anniversary is supposed to hold in tension, everything that has already happened and the one thing that cannot be repeated, and built a separate object for each. The carousel did the remembering, in a loop, in white, at fairground scale. The clock did the counting, in stone that would never look the same twice no matter how many were carved.

The room itself was not neutral staging. A vault sealed for thirty years, opened for the first time to hold a ten-year retrospective, made the show’s subject and its setting the same argument stated twice: something long closed off, made visible again, on the studio’s own terms. Building the carousel at a film studio rather than a furniture workshop was not an aesthetic flourish either. It was Broom reaching for the same craft that shaped his earliest training, on a stage, before he ever designed an object at all.

Time Machine’s real achievement is that it never needed the vault’s history, the clock’s marble or the carousel’s scale to explain each other. Each piece of the show could stand on its own. Together, inside a room that had been sealed since before most of the pieces on that carousel were designed, they turned a decade of work into something closer to a single held breath than a list.