Australian Designer Ross Gardam Collaborates with Artedomus on a Brutalist Lamp

LEDs illuminate the Hemera and all of the firm’s lights. Photography by Haydn Cattach.

With a mechanical engineer father who had metal and wood workshops at home, Ross Gardam grew up outside Melbourne, Australia, with small-scale manufacturing all around him.

“We were always making things,” says Gardam, who, as a teenager, crafted tables with tools passed down from his carpenter grandfather.

Given that background, it’s no surprise that Gardam went on to study industrial design at the nearby Monash University. After graduation, he worked in interior design firms there and in London. But his true passion ultimately prevailed, and he founded his eponymous studio in 2007, focusing on Australian-made lighting and furniture.

His Hemera lamp for Artedomus stands in the northern Greece quarry from which its marble is sourced. Photography by Sean Fennessy.

“Materials drive our projects,” Gardam explains. The Hemera table lamp, for example, was born out of a super-veined marble sourced in Greece. The light is now part of a multi-designer collection called New Volumes produced by Sydney-based manufacturer Artedomus. The material changes to delicate fluted glass for the Nebulae pendant fixture, its anodized aluminum armature—and the Hemera’s fittings—made in Melbourne. “All our products are informed by place, drawing upon local materials and manufacturing techniques,” Gardam explains.

In the firm’s workshop in Brunswick, Australia, a staff designer assembles the Ora desk lamp. Photography by Tatjana Plitt.

Speaking of local, his studio in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick was designed in collaboration with area firm MRTN Architects. Sited there partly for the neighborhood’s industrial past, the workshop is where pieces are assembled, finished, checked, and packaged. As an added bonus, there’s an alley out back that doubles as a basketball court or cricket pitch for Gardam and his eight employees. Genius, as they say, is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.