Bright Ideas
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Bill Gray is interested in illumination. As founder of HereThere Designs, a Brooklyn-based lighting studio, the 31-year-old designer produces stylish lamps, handmade shades, and bright ideas.
In Mr. Gray’s East Williamsburg studio, giant mushroom-shaped lampshades dangle from metal hooks. They are the results of a project that Mr. Gray began two and a half years ago, when he set out to develop a whole new kind of shade that would be sustainable, strong, and beautiful.
Mr. Gray, a former “dot-com” kid and venture capitalist, started HereThere Designs in 2001. A native of Brooklyn, he graduated from Harvard in 1996 and spent the late 1990s building Web sites, notably the online stock trading site National Discount Brokers. Though he saw his work as an opportunity to create products that would affect people’s lives, he was frustrated by the intangibility of the Internet. “I would work on my own projects up in my Dad’s attic,” Mr. Gray said. “I loved making things.”
When the Internet bubble burst, Mr. Gray knew it was time to make a change. “For the first time,” he said, “I was in a position to think about what I really wanted to do.” Eager to find an outlet for his creative ideas, he and a friend who was working for Vitra, a contemporary international design firm, decided to put together their own line of housewares. HereThere Designs was born.
Though the design process was rewarding, production immediately posed a problem. He traveled through Asia looking for a company to manufacture his products, but found that factories were unwilling to try anything new. “We had designed a set of square plates,” he recalled. “Now Crate and Barrel has square plates, but back then it was not something that was done. Manufacturers did not understand. They’d say, ‘We can paint a square on a round plate.”‘
Discouraged, Mr. Gray returned to New York on September 9, 2001. When the World Trade Center towers fell two days later, the experience left him reeling. “I decided I was not going to compromise my ideas. Things needed to be pushed forward. If no one else would do it, I’d have to teach myself.”
When considering a place to begin, Mr. Gray remembered the theatrical lighting he had done during high school and the dramatic ways in which light affects environment. But he found himself dissatisfied with the techniques dominating the sculptural lighting industry. “The vast majority of lampshades are cones made out of a steel frame with a sheet of paper or fabric stretched around it,” he explained.
Despite its prevalence, that method has two major flaws: paper shades are extremely fragile and steel frames limit the shapes designers can create. “A lot of problems come with just accepting the status quo,” Mr. Gray said. “We tolerate things that don’t meet the ideal, just because they have become the standard.”
Determined to change that standard, Mr. Gray discarded the old model and began working on a lampshade cast out of fiber that was both luminous and durable. He resolved to use only natural, nontoxic materials, a decision that was both ideological and practical. “I knew I was going to be in the studio 24 hours a day. I needed to use something that I could live with.”
Guided by experimentation and instinct, he spent more than a year perfecting a method for casting fiber over large cement forms into thin shells. When he couldn’t find the tools he needed, he invented new ones. “I wasn’t sure what I would end up with,” Mr. Gray said, “but I was sure that we could get so much more from the materials of the world.”
After countless prototypes that seemed promising but ended up failures, Mr. Gray decided to try abaca, a cellulous wood fiber from a palm tree used in high-end papermaking. He was immediately impressed: the fiber could be beaten until it was thin and translucent, but like hemp, it was extremely strong and stable. As far as he knows, he is the only designer using abaca in this way.
Mr. Gray had found the ideal material to work with, but he still had to design the shapes of his shades. “I had traveled a lot, and as I walked through the world I saw hard lines and boxes all around me,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Why aren’t there more curvy, humanistic shapes?'”
In his designs, Mr. Gray evokes the natural world with shapes reminiscent of smooth stones, hollow gourds, and seedpods. He sets his shades on thin stems of polished concrete and brushed steel, creating a contrast between the delicate, organic texture of the abaca and the hard, industrial surface of the base. His four basic shades have clever names that hint at their forms. The Dollop is domed like a scoop of meringue and the Michelin is as flat and round as an SUV tire. The Stay Puff has the squat, boxy body of a marshmallow. The Drop is delicately tapered like a tear.
His table, floor, and pendant lamps range in price from $400 to $1,200 and sell at IIKH, a Chelsea store specializing in sustainable design (458 W. 17 St., 212-675-9400), and by direct-order through his studio (718-386-3911).
Mr. Gray is proud of the precision and craftsmanship the process has taught him and hopes to expand the line soon, adding new shapes and color. “It’s been hard work,” he said with a laugh, “but you can’t outsource innovation.”