Designing is a kind of constant search
Free from external impositions and interested in the more experimental side of design, this Cypriot designer opens the doors of his new London studio for Domus. He speaks of his love for materials that show themselves for what they are, age well and change over time, which brings him to his ultimate aim in design: timelessness.
I grew up in Cyprus – my parents are Cypriot – but I moved to London for my first degree. I studied civil engineering and then took a master’s at the Royal College of Art. I’ve been a designer ever since. The course I took at the Royal College was Industrial Design Engineering, and the creative environment there was very important for me. I met many people who helped me develop professionally.
I never worked for anyone after I finished school; I wanted to beable to pursue my own work in my own way. I have never followed one designer as a model but I’ve always kept up with the work of many people in the field. I’m inspired by the work of artists and the freedom with which they respond to things. Most designers lack that freedom. I work out what I like and don’t like by a process of elimination. I try something and then move on. Designing is a kind of constant search. My research continued even after college. I was interested in experimental design, questioning the role of products in our everyday lives. I made some of them interactive. My first lamp was the Anti-Social Light. It would only glow when there was absolute silence. If you started talking, it would dim down and eventually switch off. If you stopped talking, the light would gradually come back. So you had to remain silent around it.
I’m fascinated with the glow of light and that’s where I start when I design a lamp. I use opaline glass in many of my pieces. The surface is always left shiny, as I like how the environment is reflected on the spherical volume. The sphere appears again and again in my work. It is the ultimate primal form. It’s so familiar because many of the things around us are spherical; we can relate to its form. I believe nothing in the creative world is new; everything has existed multiple times in history.
Designers can only reinterpret things and this is what I have been doing. Recently, I have been moving in a slightly different direction. I like materials to look like what they are, metals to look like metals and not be plastic with a metallic finish, materials pretending to be something different. I am not interested in props that photograph well. I usually leave surfaces untreated, allowing them to change with the elements over the course of time. I sometimes accelerate the process by working with patinas. I recently started using colour, although not in the form of paint. In the Fontana Amorosa collection, for example, the red is a brass patina. In the past, my focus was to begin with the materials – brass, chrome and glass. Now the emphasis is often on colour first; it’s a natural evolution. It’s an extension of the same philosophy.
A lot of the designs for Fontana Amorosa start from the floor. The light is on the ground and the actual fixture is standing on the light. This creates a sense of insecurity, a fragility and tension that I really respond to: you don’t expect lights to be on the floor. At the same time, there’s an incredible lightness about it – the object almost looks as if it’s flying. This is an entirely conscious choice: it’s about the tension between the actual positioning of the light and where it is expected to be.
My lighting brand has existed for ten years; I’ve been collaborating with Flos and its CEO Piero Gandini since 2011. He’s an incredible person; his personality is explosive, he is passionate and makes things happen. Working with Flos has been the first opportunity I’ve had to collaborate with a big company. Although this involves the production of objects on a much larger scale, the philosophy remains the same.
If anything, I think that working with Flos has allowed me to engage with more technological products, as with the String Lights or with Arrangements, which I designed for the company and launched at Euroluce this year.
This is something I haven’t been able to do with my own brand, as it is difficult to justify the investment in highly complex products with smaller manufacturing runs.
I’ve lived in London since graduating and this is where my studio is. There are eight people in the company as a whole, four working with the brand and four working with me in the design studio. For years, my house was both my living space and my working space. This year we finally decided that it was time to move into a new location giving us the opportunity to grow as a company. I had simply run out of space to put everybody. When I started my brand ten years ago, it was just me. It was something I created and worked on by myself for years. Since then, the brand has grown, slowly at first but in the last two or three years we’ve expanded a lot.
Separating my home from my studio was a big change. My house was always an important platform for me in my design work. Some of the pieces I have created – such as the Tube Chandelier, which is already 15 years old – I designed because I needed something very specific for a particular location in my house and I couldn’t find anything on the market suitable for that space. Eventually, my home became a testing ground. I would try to live with my objects, not only the lights but also the furniture I designed. It became more like a laboratory, so it made sense for my studio to be in my house. My work and my life were blended together: I was creating the objects right below my living space, following a very fluid, organic process.
Timelessness is something I aim for in my designs. I feel it is a quality that’s lacking in much of contemporary design. I was always intrigued by how other companies strived to achieve it, whether by presenting variations on classics or relaunching the classics over and over again; I reflected on what was to be gained or lost in doing so. Familiarity is definitely a quality that makes something timeless but timelessness is also about materials – you need to use ones that age well and you need to use them with honesty. It’s the interaction with time that makes a design timeless.
I do a lot of travelling now, so I no longer have the routine in my studio that I used to have. I spend much time in airports and planes. I always carry my sketchbook with me so I can record anything that inspires me. In my team, we go straight from sketch to mock-up. I like to actually see the objects around me before I respond to a new idea. Now that the studio is moving towards designing furniture, it’s become especially important to create full-size models or, if space doesn’t allow, scaled models. Space and
proportion have always been central to my work. You can’t actually understand an object unless you can see it in front of you and recognise the way it relates to the human scale and to the space around it.
Much of my work is space related – it’s architectural in a sense. I think this comes across most clearly in the String Lights designs. It’s all about the way you define space. It’s like drawing in space to mark off your environment.
