Fruits and veggies light up Paris

On display were colorful, unprecedented products in which fruits and vegetables are always fresh and seasonal.

PARIS – Italian design brand Seletti has put its signature unconventional touch on a handful of new lighting products that debuted in Paris at Maison & Objet earlier this fall.

Vitamin is a new colorful lighting project from artist-designer Marcantonio. The collection of abat-jours, candelabras, chandeliers and candlesticks are shaped like succulent vegetables and fresh fruit.

A tomato supports a carrot, which itself holds up a lemon; an orange becomes the base of a banana which holds up an eggplant; arrangements of peppers, peaches, cucumbers and even pumpkins, eggplants, watermelons, pears, pineapples and lemons give shape to bright sculptural forms; colorful, unprecedented products in which fruits and vegetables are always fresh and seasonal.

There has been an uptick in fruit- and vegetable-themed designs lately, and Seletti said the collection’s name, Vitamin, pays tribute to their healthful benefits.

Marcantonio also designed Dreamlike, a new lamp with a dreamlike shape: a little white house with a luminous sphere overhead that diffuses a soft light.

A third Seletti lighting debut, Nuvolo, was designed by Gabriele Picco. It is a table lamp whose shape is like a cartoon version of the Fiat 500, which is associated with Italian design.

The lamp springs from a work of art that Picco created in 2005 that addressed migration from Southern Italy in addition to the start of a new era of well-being and creativity. “Right from the start, I also imagined it as a lamp, a hymn to the lightness and dreams that could illuminate the precious corners of our homes,” Picco said.

Nuvolo features a stylized cloud with an internal LED on the roof of the 500.