In 2015, Modern Design Review magazine in collaboration with Ace Hotel London Shoreditch selected a group of designers to create objects to be permanently installed in its hotel. The Ready Made Go collection, as the project is called, consists of items designed to meet the needs of a busy city hotel and ranges from large installations to more functional, everyday products. The project was a great success and therefore repeated in 2016 and 2017 with new designers adding new products to the hotel’s outstanding interior.

Among those designers selected in the first round were Helena Jonasson and Veronica Dagnert. Coming from different backgrounds—Industrial Design, Fashion and Communication Design—these two women teamed up in 2010 and founded Studio Vit in London. They design furniture, lighting and layout with a passion for detail and a main interest in the relationship between elementary form, material, volume, and space.

Our work is minimalist in the sense that it is certainly reductive, but on the other hand it is not minimalist in the sense that only that which is functional has been included. Rather it’s about reducing an object so that one can see certain aspects more clearly. For example, the relationship between volumes, the contrast between materials, or the tactile qualities of a certain finish.

For Ace Hotel, the two designers were asked to create solutions for the lighting above a vitrine and for the hotel’s reception and shop area. They came up with the Cast Lights: a pendant and a table light made from cast concrete and hand-blown borosilicate glass. The table light’s glass sphere resembles a bubble held down by a concrete base, whereas a concrete hemisphere forms the top of the pendant light that sits over a second hemisphere made of glass.

Comprised of basic geometric forms and combining two juxtaposed materials the Cast Lights are both simple and complex. They effortlessly play with the laws of gravity, thus perfectly reflecting Studio Vit’s approach: For us it is important to create a tension to make a composition interesting.