How One Designer Is Handling Australia’s Reopening
Nicci Green is not new to global crisis. The designer founded Australian lighting maker Articolo Lighting when the Great Recession led to the demise of her previous glassware company, Bribe. “Pretty much overnight that business wasn’t relevant anymore” Green recalls. Standing at an empty Maison & Objet booth in 2010, “I held one vase on my hand upside down and another one on top of it and joked, ‘I don’t know—we could get into lighting.’” Today, Articolo is a global brand that operates showrooms in Melbourne and New York.
This time around, when COVID-19 began to threaten small businesses, Green took a decidedly different tack. “We approached the coronavirus pandemic with a more positive perspective,” she says. Working with long time architect David Goss, Green prepared her local showroom for reopening after lockdown with projects that include a floor-to-ceiling installation comprising 90 glass spheres from Articolo’s Fizi product line. “It shows our ability to customize our lighting for larger scales and format,” Green says.
But the undertaking also inspired her to reflect more deeply on quarantine. “I thought, ‘What are we all going to be looking forward to?’ We will want to be together.” That thought led Green to start to seek out collaboration opportunities. Soon, Articolo began to commission new creative partners with gusto. The company produced a short film with Paris Thomson of SIRAP Motion Lab, and tapped illustrator Alex Watson to reimagine the lighting collections in a series of prints. Watson now works for Articolo one day per week.
Now, some of these projects are being shared in Articolo’s Australian showrooms, as the country began reopening its economy in phases approximately a month before its American counterparts. Simultaneously, Green is finishing up a collaboration with digital media artist Yandell Walton that will transform her reopening into a spectacular event. Walton will amplify the Fizi installation’s presence by immersing visitors in motion graphics of bubbles. “When regulations allow us to have an event of 100 people, we’ll showcase this amazing digital art piece,” Green says. “COVID-19 gave us the quiet to explore this.”
The wider Melbourne community has used that time to similar ends. Interior designer Fiona Lynch launched an open-source platform for sustainable design called Future Archive during quarantine. And Green’s fellow designer Christopher Boots is welcoming clients to a new showroom that he created with interior designer Pascale Gomes-McNabb.
Green, who is launching three new product collections this summer and hopes to expand her business to six showrooms worldwide by 2025, thinks her response to COVID-19 will inform her professional thinking for a long time. She feels particularly confident that Articolo’s future trade fair stands will more likely resemble a Walton-like environment than past booths, for one. But Green does not advise her American peers to necessarily parrot Melburnians as they navigate an eventual reopening. “It’s got to come from the heart,” she says. “If you try to orchestrate something just to capitalize on this moment, then you have a business proposition rather than an authentic expression.”
By David Sokol
published in : articololighting.com
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Articolo Lighting’s Nicci Green
Nicci Green is not new to global crisis. The designer founded Australian lighting maker Articolo Lighting when the Great Recession led to the demise of her previous glassware company, Bribe. “Pretty much overnight that business wasn’t relevant anymore,” Green recalls.Standing at an empty Maison & Objet booth in 2010, “I held one vase on my hand upside down and another one on top of it and joked, ‘I don’t know—we could get into lighting.’” Today, Articolo is a global brand that operates showrooms in Melbourne and New York.
