Meet the new light of Jony Ive’s life

Jony Ive's LoveFrom and Japanese company Balmuda unveiled the ‘Sailing Lantern’, a new portable lighting object born from their first collaboration and mutual admiration.

Precisely engineered and crafted by Balmuda's team in Tokyo, the design originated from Ive's quest for a lantern for his sailboat. 'I have been sailing since I was a little boy, and when you are on the water, your connection to nature and the elements is so clear. I think there's something about using a lantern in these extreme conditions,' he told Wallpaper*. 'I was surprised that I couldn't find something that could survive in extreme maritime conditions.'

His design is quietly familiar, with a silhouette recalling vintage Fresnel lamps – although Ive was careful to create a design that wasn't nostalgic. 'The reason this feels familiar isn't because we took elements that previously existed. The reason it is familiar is humanity and ingenuity.'

Encased in a precision-machined stainless steel frame is a polished, textured glass module that conceals an LED centre. The shine on the materials and the precision with which they are refined make the 1.5kg object look like a piece of jewellery.

‘It’s not precious,’ Ive is quick to point out. And as he takes the lantern and casually throws it around between his hands, the object comes alive and reveals itself not as a delicate piece of decoration, but as a utilitarian, precisely engineered tool where beauty is a consequence of a rigorous manufacturing process.

As with all LoveFrom designs, every element is carefully considered from an aesthetic and experiential point of view. The flower-shaped dial gently clicks as the lantern is turned on and off, and the lanyard is made from textured polyester that can resist salt, sun and oil, fixed in place with a corrosion-resistant stainless steel button. ‘The lantern will scratch. And over time, I actually think that it will look better and better.’

The design is a reflection of the experience of sailing, of the elements at play, the sense of movement and, of course, the light. Ive wanted to honour that experience, with something 'that feels similarly truthful and elemental. If you hold it, it just feels right. And with the movement on a boat, it feels so alive.'

LoveFrom and Balmuda

Ive is clear that what really made this project is the collaboration with Balmuda, more than his own design. 'As I've got older, who I work with has become far more important than what I work on,' adds Ive.

The Japanese company was founded by Gen Terao in the early 2000s, with a 2003 design of a cooling platform for Apple Macintosh laptops widely considered as the design that kick-started the sequence of events that turned a personal mission into a global brand. Today, Balmuda straddles precision engineering and minimalist design – comparisons to Ive's Apple era have been a constant in the past decade, as the Japanese company has released minimally modern appliances that range from a toaster oven to an elegant electric kettle.

Ive had been observing Terao’s work, regularly visiting Balmuda’s Tokyo store. 'There are all these diverse products, but they all expressed the values and care of a person, and there was a clarity and a truthfulness that I thought was really striking,' he recalls. 'So more important than [making] a lantern, it was the opportunity to be able to collaborate.'

'When Jony came to me with the idea of this lantern, I found it really romantic,' says Terao. 'Combining this nautical idea with the contemporary technology of LEDs, I just got the impression that he wanted to create an excellent tool. And we are tool makers.' What followed were 'a very hard couple of years' in which the Balmuda team developed Ive's idea. 'The level of precision and polish that he wanted was something I'd never come across before,' Terao recalls. 'So my team had to learn as we went along, and it was a very valuable experience for us.'

Nature informing light

Terao's team had already worked on a portable lantern, which became the starting point for the collaboration's lighting element. And the light given by the ‘Sailing Lantern’ is both precise and poetic: as the dimming dial is turned on, the low light starts with a pink-red glow, quietly growing in intensity until it reaches its full illumination with a white-blue tint. This, Terao explains, is the same effect of the previous lantern he produced, achieved thanks to a series of red and white LEDs that can be controlled as the light is dimmed, to create an effect that is as close to natural light, or fire, as an industrially produced light can be.

'It's the same that you find with flames: lower flames are red, and as they become hotter, they turn blue. They are the colours of nature,' notes Terao. Switching off the lantern is a pleasure in itself, with the light going off slowly, almost imperceptibly.

This, Ive notes, is a consequence of his design process, driven by language as much as design. 'I can only draw a small percentage of the characteristics of this object, but I can write about many more. You don't switch off a candle or a bonfire. So when you use a word like extinguish, that to me is so open: the possibilities, the provocation. And I think when you switch this off, the feel of the mechanism and the sound and then the glow just gently goes. That's what makes us happy.'

A project rooted in collaboration

'Jony Ive’s attention to detail is world famous,' notes Terao. 'And for us as engineers, meeting his requirements was hard. But we took on this challenge, and maybe the biggest gift that Jony has given us is just that our abilities in science and technology have improved as a result.'

Ive echoes the sentiment. 'Gen is not interested in sailing, but we're both interested in solving these tough, crazy problems,' he adds. 'When you make something, people focus very often on the tangible expression of it. But the other consequences are what you learn, and your relationship.

'As you gain more experience in your practice, what seems really valuable gently starts to shift. And I feel overwhelmed with gratitude to be lucky enough to find somebody that I just love working with. I think you would be foolish and arrogant not to celebrate that, and I am very mindful of how rare and precious it is.'

Sailing Lantern is available for $4,800 (€4,500) in a limited edition of 1,000, from balmuda.com/lovefrom-balmuda