Luzifer’s Mikado Light

Named after the Spanish game of pick-up sticks, the Mikado was created by Miguel Herranz, who had wanted to fashion a lamp out of narrow pieces of veneer. So for both the hanging and standing versions of the Mikado, he used are a six-foot-long band of veneer, onto which he screwed seven more lengths of veneer spliced into six-inch-long by a-half-an-inch-thick pieces. He then twisted the entire base strip into a double-8 formation.

The lamp’s thin strips are not only translucent, allowing one to see the grain of the wood (bleached ash, dyed tulip wood, or natural cherry), but the strips are also very flexible, despite being reinforced with a polyester finish. A fluorescent light set in a frosted glass tube shines from the center of the piece. The suspended version of Mikado has stainless steel cables, while the standing style has a matte chrome metal pole and base.