Costly and chic do not always go hand and hand. If you need evidence to support this statement, Jamie Laubhan-Oliver and Elizabeth Lavin’s “Treasure Hunters” series in D Home should suffice. They’re turning up plenty of chic home pieces, without the nasty price tag.
This month they created lamps out of Home Depot concrete blocks that cost $2.28 each. True story. I’ve got the behind the scenes photos (iPhone, sorry) from their strategy meeting with David Wood, the lamp maker who helped their concrete dreams come true.
Step one to making these beauties was carrying them into David’s workspace. They look heavy, right? Well they are: 25 pounds each, to be exact.
Next up, Jamie, Elizabeth, and David got to work on the assembly. First they had to decide what would be the front of the lamp. The pillars came with imperfections, which the duo loves. “Concrete is a beautiful, textural material that people tend to overlook because it’s so inexpensive,” Jamie says. They played around with the pairings of the wooden rounds, which are stained mahogany. The end result: one lamp had a “floating” look because of a smaller base (Jamie’s), the other, a uniform base without a topper (Elizabeth’s). After much debate, they selected a neutral ivory cloth cord for the lamps as not to draw attention to them.
Next up, to the fanciful shop of lamp toppers: The Lamp Shoppe. Stop by for pretty much any and every finial, harp, and shade combination you could think of. Jamie’s clear lucite finial gives her lamp a barely-there modern edge, while Elizabeth’s sleek glass one completes the grayscale look.
And, violà! You’ve got yourself a 25-pound lamp.
If you’re looking to duplicate this project at home, let us know by uploading a photo of the completed masterpiece on Instagram with the hashtag #DearDHome!
