At Studio Botté, the Future of Design Starts in the Trash

In a former textile factory in Mile-Ex, 100 beachball-sized globes are stacked neatly to the ceiling. Once vintage streetlamps used to light up Montreal during Expo 67, these small pieces of history will dodge the landfill and become collectable fixtures.

Each globe’s finish is a record of where it stood. "It's acrylic and polycarbonate, depending on the supplier and the year they were installed, but the sun's UV rays had an impact, depending on which side of the street they were on, they got more or less light, and it gave them this patina," says Philippe Charlebois-Gomez, upcycler, designer, and artisan. He founded studio botté in 2017, a design studio that builds handcrafted lighting fixtures entirely from waste materials.

Made with Montreal

Every corner of what the team calls the atelier, or “matériauthèque” is stacked with milky globes, stool bases, ski poles, and fan guards—a classic since his upcycling beginnings in the Plateau. Trained in industrial design, Charlebois-Gomez cut his teeth at Lambert & Fils, a Montreal lighting house, before he began collecting discarded objects on his bike ride home, stashing fan guards under his desk. Call it urban mining: a scavenger's eye trained on a designer's shop floor.

"Students buy cheap, throw out this," he says of the fan guards that became his signature material, "I have thousands."

Not everything that lands in his hands gets taken apart. Friends drop off broken things because they know he has the tools. "I'm not gonna dismantle a toaster to make a lamp," he says. "I'll just fix the toaster and drop it off at Renaissance." He calls himself a reclaimer, not a destroyer. "I'm elevating its value because it was trash."

Charlebois-Gomez has built a community that now sources for him—people sending photos of street finds, small businesses offloading mistaken production runs. "It's fun to have a little bit of bulk so that I can test things," he says. "Sometimes a ceramic piece breaks in my hands during the process, I have to call the client and say: are you open to something else?"

A personal process

"I don't believe in the add-to-cart culture," Charlebois-Gomez says. "Go to the place. Smell the smells. Meet the artist. You may not buy, but you'll have a story to tell."