Tord Boontje was born in 1968 in the Netherlands. He studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven from 1986-1991 and then completed an MA in Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art from 1992-1994. Boontje is based in London and works as a multi-disciplinary designer in the fields of product, furniture, and lighting design. He is known to bring warmth, light, colour and beauty inspired by the natural world into everyday objects and spaces. With his partner, glass artist Emma Woffenden, he began his career making glassware from recycled bottles (Transglass, 1997). He started designing eyewear and watches for Alexander McQueen in 1998 and the following year gained notice for his brutalist Rough-and-Ready furniture at Tate Modern. His design aesthetic changed radically with his daughter's birth in 2000. In 2002, drawing inspiration from flowers and lace, he created the Garland light for Habitat and the delicate Blossom chandelier for Swarovski. The latter, a simple, asymmetric form, completely transformed a very traditional object type. In 2003, Boontje designed the V&A Swarovski crystal Christmas tree in collaboration with Alexander McQueen.

His studio has gone on to collaborate with many major international companies and his work, which continues to win awards, is represented in the collections of a number of public museums and galleries chiefly in Britain, Holland and the USA. Over the last 25 years he has created a series of iconic and memorable pieces including the Blossom chandelier, Fig Wardrobe, Shadowy Chair and Transglass. He was appointed Professor at the Royal College of Art in 2009 and headed the Design Products programme for four years. Since then, he has worked as visiting professor in Europe and China. In 2021 Boontje’s second monograph was published by Rizzoli International Publications. Recent projects have included a series of homewares designed for Habitat’s 60th anniversary collection and Meadow Shadow, an installation of his vibrant Shadowy Chairs at Wakehurst, Kew.

The Garland Light is a delicate metal strand of flowers wrapped around a light bulb to create an organic shade and is designed so that several Garlands can be linked together to create larger chandeliers. The Garland Light comes as a flat sheet that can be cut to make a long stand to wrap around the light bulb. The Lights come in Gold or Silver and the original version is made from brass. Garland was relaunched in 2019 as a studio produced product and is today made from etched stainless steel.

Tord Boontje writes: ‘The inspiration behind the Garland light was a walk in the forest and seeing the sunlight shining through the trees. I liked the idea of creating these flowers that encircle a light bulb. At the time when I designed this piece, I was looking for a way to link decoration and technology in order to create something that was not nostalgic. I had seen examples of photographically etching metal some years before, these were computer components. I realised that this would be a suitable process and material for my idea. Because of the very high precision of the process it was possible to create something that would be impossible to make by hand and therefore could not have existed in the past.’