DESIGNERS
Red Hook, Brooklyn
VISITING OUR FRIENDS and longtime collaborators Jean and Dylan always offers the promise of a small but dependably memorable adventure. Where normally a taxi or subway ride might suffice for visiting other friends in New York, the quickest and most fun route out to Jean and Dylan’s Brooklyn studio is made by boat—specifically the IKEA Brooklyn ferry departing from Wall Street’s Pier 11 in Manhattan. We always look forward to the scenic half-hour ride across the choppy waters, delivering Instagram-worthy views of both Manhattan and Brooklyn from either side. The buildup of anticipation as we near the harbor and our friends’ studio is genuine—a reminder of how the journey adds to an appreciation of the eventual destination.
Thankfully, once on shore it’s only a short walk from the pier along the waterfront to Jean and Dylan’s design studio. Operating under the nom de guerre Ladies & Gentlemen, the couple’s business is housed within a formidable brick building with a multitude of soot-black shutters, arched windows, and doorways, duplicated with the repetitive composition of a simple song. It’s hard to imagine the bustling creative space was once occupied by the back-breaking labor of Brooklyn’s waterfront industries, but if you close your eyes, the seashore’s past can creep back into the imagination. Jean informs us Red Hook remains one of the last neighborhoods where artists and designers can still carve out an affordable space to create and collaborate. Once-abandoned industrial buildings are now subdivided into a multitude of raw spaces, including our friends’ 2,000-square-foot studio. It’s not formally a live/work studio, but plenty of life and work unfolds within its walls. The studio interior is decorated with a harmonious collection of random samples, scraps, found objects, design explorations, and bespoke furnishings the couple has collected. The organization allows them to literally “grab things from the shelf” to piece together prototypes informed by the tactile rather than by concepts alone. “We’ve collected a variety of art glass samples over the years, but for the longest time we never knew what to do with them. Then two years later they became the foundation of an idea for a light fixture. The material became something like a language for us to use. We keep stuff around to continue to speak to us,” Dylan explains.
L&G’s work today falls somewhere between lighting and kinetic sculpture, abstract geometric mobiles representing functional studies in color, balance, movement, and even sound. The multitude and diversity of their work seems to represent the efforts of a collective rather than a mere couple: mismatched and colorful chandeliers hanging with the mysterious purpose of a Rube Goldberg contraption, wind chimes assembled with the free-flowing composition of a ’60s jazz ensemble improvisation, a luminous and layered sconce inspired by the late-1800s Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. The mobiles they designed for Poketo use a medley of metal, glass, brass, and wood, conjuring a heightened attention to simplicity comparable to a traditional Japanese aesthetic.
Their style has evolved over the years, but Jean notes the constant in their work is an observable commitment to offering an experiential relationship between object and person.
