Glamorous Milanese designer Gabriella Crespi contemplated an age-old decorating dilemma in the mid-1970s: How could she bring the restorative warmth of the sun indoors? Her answer came in the form of Rising Sun, a radiant lighting collection made from an unusual pair of materials: brass and bamboo. The latter, she observed, “combines force and flexibility, the warmth of color and a capacity to let light through.”
Of Rising Sun’s rare designs—few were ever produced—one has recently proliferated: the Fungo lamp, which features a swooping brass base and bamboo shade that gives it a mushroom-like silhouette. The lamp “embodies Crespi’s talent to produce objects of great perfection,” says agenda-setting dealer Nina Yashar, who showed an original Fungo alongside other Rising Sun pieces at Nilufar gallery (nilufar.com), her Milan showroom, in April. “It is a sinuous and simple form—a feminine image. It shows the power of the female.”
Crespi, who died in 2017, explored other materials to give Fungo a new look as time passed, topping the brass bases with Plexiglas shades to create even more light play. This year, Crespi’s daughter Elisabetta put that later iteration back into production, and is selling them at Dimoregallery—run by AD100 design firm Dimore Studio. Made by the same craftspeople as the originals, the reproduction Fungos were launched in a dreamy installation at Dimoregallery during Milan Design Week. Why this piece? Elisabetta Crespi, whose childhood home had a Fungo in almost every room, reflects on the lamp’s splendid solar energy: “In my early life I definitely felt surrounded by the sun.”
