Tank Bowls.
Kei Ng and Brian Richer are the co-founders of Castor, a Toronto design studio well known for taking the everyday, overlooked stuff of life and elevating it into high-end furniture, decor and lighting.
The pair turned the worn, badly weathered marble panels that were falling off Toronto's First Canadian Place office tower into elegant coffee tables and lamps.
With their Recycled Tube Light, they did the impossible: Making fluorescent tubes look good. They gracefully tied a ring of burnt-out bulbs together, then illuminated them from within with a spectral, incandescent glow.
For their latest piece, the Tank Bowl, they've taken the bottoms of decommissioned fire extinguishers (the off-cuts of a popular series of Castor pendant lamps that make use of the tops) and lathed, polished and painted them into gracefully fluid forms that belie their entirely ordinary, industrial origins. $50 for two. Available through castordesign.ca.