British designer Lee Broom invites visitors into The Chant Chambers, a new installation for London Design Festival 2026. Last year we saw his original piece ‘Beacon’ light up the South Bank. This year sees a continuation of the designer’s portable lighting piece entitled ‘Chant’. The newly expanded collection includes oversized chandelier compositions, sculptural wall lights, linear pendants and architectural lighting structures.
Step inside The Chant Chambers by Lee Broom
Broom, who has been busy illuminating Madonna's Confessions II film , notes that some pieces feel complete as a single object, while others are collections that can evolve. ‘It’s often the ones based around very simple shapes that allow me to do that, and ‘Chant’ has that quality. It’s a very pure form, a glass cube with a circular indentation, so there’s a natural opportunity to play with repetition, scale, and different configurations. I’ve always loved lighting that can really inhabit a space, rather than simply sit within it, and that became the starting point for expanding the collection.’
I’ve always loved lighting that can really inhabit a space, rather than simply sit within it
Lee Broom
The cubic design allows it to flow through a room and intertwine within the interior, sitting at the intersection between architecture and decor. The pieces feel atmospheric and sultry. Presented in a new smoked glass finish, the darker tones echo a 1970s interior.
‘I’m a modernist,’ exclaims Broom, ‘but I’ve always been drawn to nostalgia, particularly the late 1970s. There was something very distinctive about interiors from that period; they could be decorative, but they also had a real sculptural quality, and often a slightly more masculine sensibility than traditional interior decoration. I love the smoked glass, mirrors, and wall-to-wall carpeting.
There was something very distinctive about late 1970s interiors; they could be decorative, but they also had a real sculptural quality
Lee Broom
‘They were strong design gestures that created a real atmosphere. I also like the lighting from that period too. It didn’t always take centre stage, but there would often be one strong sculptural chandelier, or lighting would be integrated throughout the interior in a much more architectural way.’
When designing ‘Chant ', Broom looked towards the glass block’s two historical references: when it first emerged during the Art Deco period, and then its re-emergence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The collection draws on these moments, but filtered through a modernist lens.
Broom’s work has a distinctive sense of geometry, yet he doesn’t quite know why. ‘Even when I try to design something more organic or textural, there is usually some sense of symmetry, balance or geometry sitting within. I’m not a particularly mathematical person, but I do think I’m very drawn to order.
‘I suppose it also reflects the way I am generally. I like order, I like discipline, and I’m a perfectionist. So the geometry within the work probably comes quite naturally from that. It gives me a framework, and then within that framework I can start to play with material, proportion and light.’
For Broom’s expanded vision of ‘Chant’, how it makes you feel is just as important as how it functions. ‘I’ve always designed from quite an emotive place. Of course, form and function are fundamental, and that’s where the real challenges lie, but with the expanded Chant collection I wanted to create something that also brings a sense of nostalgia and playfulness, while still feeling very considered and conceptual.
'There’s something quite mesmerising about seeing these glass forms repeated across a ceiling or through a space. In multiples, they become almost hypnotic. So I hope people feel uplifted by it, a sense of joy, but also slightly transported, so that they stop for a moment and really experience the light rather than simply see it.’
The full installation will be on view to the public during London Design Festival, 15–20 September 2026, at Lee Broom, 91, 93 and 95 Rivington Street, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3AY
