Tom Rossau

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ABOUT TOM ROSSAU
Selv-taught designer Tom Rossau (born 1970) had been driving around the world with his motorcycle, before one day he hold a long stripe of birch veneer in his hands. This became lamp TR4 - that today is sold both in Denmark and several countries in the world - and the beginning of his life as designer and producer of a beautiful and successful range of handmade lamps.

As a child Tom liked to play in the basement of his parents' house, in a small town 80 km north-east from Copenhagen. He loved to do carpenter works, to saw and hammer, to build any kind of object, from pirate ships to imaginative shapes.

There is a straight line from his childhood games until when, at the end of the 90s, he opens his first small shop in Copenhagen, where Tom fiddles at first with metal and then with wooden veneer.

Nowadays he still plays like when he was a child, using stripes of birch veneer, Japanese paper and plastic, until he has found the perfect shape for new beautiful lamps.

Today the basement has been replaced with a 680 sq.mt. showroom in central Copenhagen, with the workshop facing the street, so everyone can see the raw material, a series of half-finished models hanging on long wardrobe racks, and how they become beautiful lamps through the expert hands of Tom and his co-workers.

The material is Tom's first source of inspiration and he begins from scratch every time he finds a new one. He sits and draws, but he gets the real inspiration only when he holds the material in his hands, and he can feel how it bends and takes shape. Tom helps the material to find its natural form. For example he doesn't push or force the veneer stripes in other directions than what they naturally would do, like otherwise it is done with industrial production, where the wood is moulded by big machines: quite a different process from Tom's handmade production.

Nowadays Tom uses a range of wooden veneers, Japanese coated paper, PP plastic and copper plated aluminium, depending on the shape of the model, its technical features and the final use in residential or public interiors.

The birch veneer that we use comes from managed forests in Finland, where our supplier was the first wooden products company to be granted the ISO 14001 certification in recognition of their environmentally friendly operations. They also have PEFC certification for the sustainable origin of their wood.