There is something very contradictory about spending years creating a home completely custom designed just for you and then filling it with objects designed for thousands of others. While all sorts of fixtures such as flooring, doors, cabinetry and hardware can all be tailored relatively easily, some pieces are much harder to source. Lighting is one of those things. So when you come across beautiful hand-blown glass lights that can be customised in everything from colour and shape to the finish of the metalwork, it feels like a bit of a discovery. Well that’s how we felt, when we stumbled on the gorgeous creations by boutique lighting studio Rothschild & Bickers.
As it turns out, the story behind the lights is every bit as interesting as the pieces themselves. The founders, Victoria Rothschild and Mark Bickers, both found their way into glass through quite different paths in London’s design world. Neither seems to have started out with a grand plan to build a lighting brand. They were simply fascinated by making things, by materials and, eventually, by glass itself. Somewhere along the way those two interests came together, and lighting gave them the chance to turn that fascination into extraordinary works of art that were not just full of colour and personality but also functional.
Victoria had always been a maker. Pottery, wood and cloth had all interested her, but a two week workshop in the glass department during her foundation year changed her direction completely. “I fell in love with the material,” she recalls. Her interest went beyond the glass itself. Architecture and the work of designers including Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris and Christopher Dresser had already fascinated her, and glass opened up another way of exploring the relationship between objects and interiors. After completing her degree she continued developing her craft at the International Glass Centre in Brierley Hill, gaining an understanding not only of glassblowing but of Britain’s long history of glass production.
Mark came remarkably close to choosing ceramics instead but the seductive nature of glass won out. Making was a big part of Mark’s world – his father was a furniture designer who was constantly creating things, and Mark credits him with helping establish his own fascination with materials and the process of turning an idea into a physical object. While studying Ceramics and Glass, and later at London’s Royal College of Art, his attention increasingly shifted towards design and a question that would eventually become important to Rothschild & Bickers – how can something retain the character and quality of the handmade while also becoming a functional product? Lighting provided the answer, although the business did not begin with a neatly formulated plan for a collection.
“The seductive nature of glass won out,” Mark Bickers
One of Victoria and Mark’s first commissions together was creating lighting for a Ted Baker store in Westbourne Grove. The project gave them freedom to experiment with glass and other materials, and further commissions followed. Before long they were creating lighting for Ted Baker stores around the world, collaborating with the company’s interior architects and designers and gradually building a network of specialist suppliers.
It was during this period that the pair began developing the colours, textures, materials and finishes that would become part of the Rothschild & Bickers vocabulary. More importantly, it showed them that there was a market for bespoke lighting that could be designed as part of an interior rather than selected after everything else had been decided. Eventually they distilled what they had learned into an initial collection of just four products – one was the Vintage Light, a design that remains among the brand’s most popular pieces today.
Their visual language, however, had begun forming much earlier. As students, Victoria and Mark spent hours wandering through London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, drawn to Victorian ornament, the Arts & Crafts movement and the extraordinary level of skill evident in the objects around them. They became interested in decoration not as something frivolous, but as something capable of changing the mood and identity of a room. That helps explain why Rothschild & Bickers lighting has such a distinctive personality. Colour can be rich or softened, glass can be transparent or opaque, while fringes, metalwork and shapes occasionally venture into the theatrical. There is often something familiar within the pieces, but rarely something predictable.
Colour is particularly personal to the brand. Traditional metal oxides create the starting shades – copper for blues, gold for pinks and reds, cadmium for yellows and iron for greens – before Victoria and Mark develop them into the softer, more nuanced palette that has become associated with their work. Because the glass is hand-blown, subtle differences in thickness and colour remain from one shade to another. Grouped together, the pair describe the effect as being like a collection of jewels.
“We’ve always been drawn to lighting because it can be as enticing as jewellery and often becomes the focal point of a room. Glass is central to that because of its extraordinary relationship with light, its transparency, colour, texture and fluidity can create atmosphere and constantly change as the light moves through it”
Interior by Scheer & Co, Austin TX – Opulent Optic in Bronze with Havana Gold Fringe
For owners creating a custom home, and interior designers working with their client’s who truly want something unique, perhaps the most interesting part is how far that individuality can go. Bespoke work has been part of Rothschild & Bickers from the beginning. Along with choosing from existing colours, finishes and configurations, projects can involve completely new shapes, scales, colours and details. The fact that each piece is made by hand in their UK workshop gives the studio the freedom to experiment when an interior calls for something outside the existing collection.
Some of their most interesting collaborations have come from designers willing to push that idea. Long-time collaborator Danielle Lee of DCL Interiors, for example, regularly works with the studio on dramatic stairwell installations for high-end homes, mixing colours, scales and styles. Victoria and Mark credit her willingness to “go big” with encouraging them to view their lights as part of the architecture itself.
Standard Tiered Light customised in Polished Copper
And perhaps this is where their work feels most relevant to a custom home. Lighting does not have to be the item chosen to fill an electrical point once everything else is finished. A cascading installation can shape the experience of a stairwell; a group of hand-blown pendants can establish the character of a dining space; a single piece can bring colour, craft and personality into an otherwise restrained room.
After all, the homes we tend to remember are rarely those where everything matches perfectly. They are the ones filled with pieces that feel personal – objects someone loved enough to choose, commission or have made specifically for them.
For Victoria Rothschild and Mark Bickers, that philosophy began with a shared fascination with glass, and more than two decades later, they are still blowing, shaping and experimenting with the same extraordinary material, creating lights intended not simply to illuminate an interior, but to make it something really special.
Discover the full collection of gorgeous bespoke hand blown lighting at www.rothschildbickers.com
