The right lighting choices can make or break your interior decor, and it's too easy to leave your selection on the back-burner while you assemble the perfect collection of mid-century influenced furniture for your home.
It's not just that every room should look at its best in the evening - after all that's when you're most likely to want to show it off - but that the lamps themselves can, when chosen carefully, become sculptures in their own right.
Enter Montreal's Lambert et Fils, one of the new generation of small-scale artisan lighting specialists who've realised that this is a niche market.
Founded by Samuel Lambert in 2010, these designers aim to "take cues from mid-century Modernism, the industrial age, and Lambert's own minimalist aesthetic".
The result is five over-lapping collections of lighting, conceived by Lambert et Fils's in-house group of designers. Among the materials used are powder-coated aluminum, brass and marble. Shapes are, as promised, distinctly minimalistic, so that even when not lit, your lighting forms a quiet focal point.
The Beaubien range is the collection that uses power-coated aluminium - in structures that are sometimes ladder-like and often exposing the bulbs unashamedly. These are, after all, lights.
Brass is the over-riding material in the Clark collection, looking at first glance as if it's rough-hewn, while in fact it's meticulously shaped in the Lambert et Fils workshops.
For us, these sculptural pieces take lighting to a - deserved - new level.
