Five eye-popping gadgets for the home

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Sights fantastic

A well-established trend in domestic lighting is to use smartphone apps to manage complex LED set-ups, fine-tuning their colour and intensity to create violet bathrooms, cerise utility rooms and “scenes” that can change by the hour or on a whim. By contrast, Italian design firm Mandalaki substitutes that granular control with a single powerful lamp emitting a consistent, unfluctuating radiance – effectively an indoor lighting installation. “We don’t want people playing around too much [with them],” says co-founder Enrico De Lotto. “After all, when you buy a painting, you don’t then paint over that painting.”

It’s a gorgeous artwork with a sky-gazing quality

The firm has its roots in designing lighting installations in Milan. De Lotto created his first prototype by combining high-performance LED filters with arrays of old optical lenses he’d inherited from his grandfather, an ophthalmologist. He then set himself the challenge of creating similar, large-scale effects in smaller spaces using compact hardware; this resulted in a range of lamps, made from anodised blocks of aluminium, which cast nature-inspired lighting effects across walls and ceilings.

The Halo Mini, a scaled-down, table-mounted version of its larger lamps, became one of its bestsellers, and the Mini Landscape range (just launched at Milan Design Week) is its latest incarnation: three distinct models that each project a specific, linear colour gradient but with real three-dimensional impact. Horizon evokes the view of a sunset from an aeroplane, Sunrise recreates the Dolomites dawns of De Lotto’s childhood, and Vice is inspired by the pink, humid skies of Miami.

Practically speaking, the Mini is a stable, solid unit with a tiltable head (allowing you to extend that linear gradient up the wall) and a dimmer (Mandalaki’s one concession to user control). The size of the projection is roughly double the distance you place the lamp from the wall, so 75cm back will give you a display around 1.5m across. But calling it a display undersells it; it’s a gorgeous artwork with a meditative, sky-gazing quality – something you’d never hope to achieve with a bunch of LED lamps, no matter how much you fiddled with the settings. 

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Wales song

Fred Davies has been building and refining full-range, horn-based speakers in the Welsh countryside for five decades, and this is the culmination of that work. Faithful musical reproduction is achieved with just two drivers (one dedicated to deep bass below 70Hz) and a unique arrangement of horns, tubes and chambers that dictates the speakers’ almost sensual shape. They’re constructed from glass-reinforced cement and fibreglass with a ceramic glaze finish (you choose the colour), and they sound as extraordinary as they look, even when fed from a comparatively modest amp. Chrome castors and weather-resistant jackets encourage you to wheel them outside to create the ultimate patio sound system.

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Now you see me…

Huge television screens can dominate a space and feel oppressive when they’re turned off. But this one, housed in a freestanding unit, becomes transparent when you hit standby. That’s down to OLED technology; with no backlight needed, LG has sandwiched the pixels between transparent layers. Between off (transparent) and conventional watching mode (a thin blackout layer rises up behind the OLED) there’s a middle ground, where see-through screensavers or information can be displayed, seemingly hovering in space. Thanks to a neat cable management system and an LG Zero Connect box (which sits up to 10m away and handles connectivity to gaming consoles, etc), it wins the prize for the least obtrusive 77in TV in existence.

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The life holographic

New York-based Looking Glass makes a range of spatial displays for showing off 3D images, and the USB-powered Go is its smallest, a smartphone-like 6in model with a built-in, fold-out stand. Assemble a playlist of your digital photos using Looking Glass’s software (iOS, Android or via a browser) and they’ll be synced with the Go as 3D holograms. Thereafter, your images display with a new and striking depth, moving on about every 10 seconds (or you can tap a button on the base to pause on a particular image). Snap the Go into the bundled frame, pop it on a shelf and it becomes a unique showcase of personal memories. And 3D creators using Unreal Engine or Unity, for example, can use it as a display for testing.

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Thunderstruck

Austrian firm Pro-Ject has become the go-to partner for musicians wanting to incorporate their branding into high-spec turntables. Its back catalogue, hand-built in Europe, includes beautifully styled commemorations of work by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Metallica and the Vienna Philharmonic, to name just a few. The latest features AC/DC’s lightning bolt logo along with a red-glass platter, a sub-platter with red LED lighting, a flat acrylic tonearm and an Ortofon 2M Red cartridge. Audiophiles may shudder (high-end audio is usually more understated) but this is heavyweight kit, meticulously designed to eliminate resonance, provide rock-solid playback speeds and showcase any collection of vinyl (not just hard rock from Australia).

@rhodri