PM Home & Garden : Bright Lights / Big Fixtures, May 2003
Download Article (.pdf)Cradling Little Baby, his 4-month-old Chihuahua under his chin, luminary Warren Muller runs his free hand along the cluttered shelves of his Old City workshop, past the dressmaker form and the funnels, the tuba, the violin case, and the gas-grill burners. He skips by the bag of baseballs, and the gravy boats and the blue reindeer with the orange nose. He’s looking for inspiration. He settles on a two-foot-tall glass soda bottle resting on the top shelf.
The scrape and squeak of the rolling ladder necessary to reach the 14-foot-tall shelf breaks the silence in bahdeebahdu, the spacious modern showroom that houses Muller’s unique flea-market-find-lighting-fixture-shop and partner RJ Thornburg’s interior design business. The pair moved into the 2.400-square-foot former warehouse space on Cherry Street last year, the expansion allowing Muller, who had worked out of a smaller Old City storefront around
the corner, to accept larger commissions.
Today Muller is working for his most demanding client – himself. This fixture will hang in the dining room of his Old City apartment. “I’ve already started over twice,” says the 56-year-old artist, circling the work-in-progress, and eight-foot hodgepodge of light and whimsy that hangs like a charm bracelet from the ceiling of his concrete workshop. (It can take several months for Muller to finish one of his creations.)
He inserts a bottle into the fixture near the top, alongside the upside-down oversized wineglass. No. He tries it at the bottom, balancing it on the wire basket filled with illuminated test tubes and a ceramic puppy. No again. Next to the weathered blue wooden bucket? Still not quite right. He pauses, then turns the bottle over and tries yet again. “I’m always improvising because it’s not just about creating a light fixture, it’s about creating an atmosphere,” says Muller.
It’s about theater, really. Muller earned a degree in film-making from the Philadelphia college of Art. This led him to a job with Philadelphia’s Group Motion Dance Company, where he created motion-picture backdrops for the troupes performances. He’s been recreating that project for 30 years, experimenting with the different moods light can evoke through his fixtures.