Lee Broom lights up Madonna, 3 Days of Design, a design history in chairs

British designer Lee Broom has received a lot of milestone calls over his career. Beginning his creative tenure by interning for Vivienne Westwood, he’s spent the last 20 years crafting award-winning light pieces and luxury furniture with his eponymous design brand. In 2020, he collaborated with Beyoncé, providing a minimalist yet striking gold ‘Hanging Hoop’ chair for her 2020 visual album Black Is King. Yet for Broom, who first endeared himself to Westwood by creating a fantasy costume for Madonna in a junior design competition and has now contributed his own bespoke piece to the pop superstar’s newly released Confessions II film, there are few calls like one from the Queen of Pop.

‘The 15-year-old me is doing cartwheels in their bedroom, for sure. I was thrilled,’ he tells Wallpaper*. The film takes viewers through the pop icon’s forthcoming album via a series of interlinked rooms and vignettes. In the section dedicated to new song ‘One Step Away’, Madonna is featured in a slick, hard-edged kitchen. For the scene, it’s a bespoke adaptation of Broom’s 2015 ‘Crystal Tube’ light that illuminates the image. The designer tells Lisa Wright about lighting up Madonna.

Silver and stone dice, a woodland-inspired Mikado set, a spinning top, a snail whistle, a yo-yo… Danish design house and silversmithy Georg Jensen is showing its playful side with a new series of games, with which visitors – Rosa Bertoli among them – were invited to get hands-on at the brand’s ‘Secret Garden’ in Copenhagen during 3 Days of Design.

Can’t imagine knocking the family silver about outside? ‘It’s a space [of] playfulness and curiosity, allowing people to interact with silver in a way that isn’t so rarefied,’ said creative director Paula Gerbase, who since her appointment in 2024, has been studying Georg Jensen’s history and the opportunities to quietly shake up its heritage in a way that is both exciting and respectful.

‘[Silver is] a material that is living and breathing, has patina, and dents, and evolves with time; and of course, it’s absolute quality, but we’re showing it for what it is – a very beautiful material that can weather and absorb these simple moments. Because if you inherit something, you’re inheriting it with the traces of those moments well lived.’

Two young men, lads, possibly teenagers, stand in the Adriatic, stacked one atop the other. The blonder of the pair wears a chain and wraps his legs over the shoulders and around the torso of his companion, who is bare chested with a tan and striped swimming shorts. ‘I asked them to start playing where the water was low, but they decided that one would sit on the other’s shoulders. It was not my idea!’ photographer Walter Pfeiffer shares of the double portrait, shot in Rimini in the 1980s. ‘I love when the people I photograph participate in the process. I like being in good company.’

At Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, where a major new retrospective, ‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’, has just opened, the image is blown up to movie-poster size. It’s a fitting introduction to Pfeiffer’s six-decade career (in 1984, it covered the October issue of French publication Gai Pied, once described as ‘the queen of Europe’s gay magazines’). Zoe Whitfield meets the octogenarian photographer at the show for a look back.

We’re suitably in love with a chair that wears its heart on its sleeve. Or, at least, at the end of its extruded, anodised aluminium tubes. Revealed at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, the collaboration between Danish furniture brand Muuto and local studio Spacon is equal parts rational and romantic. Limited to 150 pieces (initially available at the Voo Store pop-up during the fair), this heartbreaker may be hard to pin down.