Sarah Cullen

Clara del Portillo

Design studio Yonoh was founded in 2006 by Clara del Portillo and Alex Selma in Valencia, Spain. The studio boasts a full portfolio of product, furniture and lighting design, working with numerous big names in the lighting industry, including Vibia, Bover, Flos, Foscarini, Zero and Louis Poulsen.

During its short career, Yonoh has acquired multiple industry awards such as Red Dot, iF design award and Wallpaper* Design Award to name a few.

Selma and del Portillo both have backgrounds as industrial designers and established solo careers before meeting in 2004 at a young designer’s exhibition. Fast forward to 2006 and their first collection was released under the collaborative Yonoh brand. Since, the pair have created numerous design collections across various disciplines, alongside their work as Associate Teachers at the Cardenal Herrera CEU University in Valencia, delivering workshops and lectures around the world promoting their work.

Acting Editor, Sarah Cullen sits down with del Portillo to find out more about her background as a designer and her work as a Partner at Yonoh.

“I’m from Valencia in Spain and studied Design Technical Engineering at the Cardenal Herrera CEU University. I was then an Erasmus student in Paris at the Strate College. That was a very enriching experience that made me grow as a person,” she says. “University made me fall in love with design. The ambience was great, and we had professional designers as teachers that made us love the profession.

“After finishing my studies and returning from Paris, I started working on different design jobs while I was preparing to present at a young designer’s exhibition in Valencia called NUDE. There is where Alex and I met and where Yonoh’s seed was planted. After that, we started collaborating on some projects and then in 2006 we started our own studio.”

del Portillo’s career and interests have never strayed from the design world, with her first official job in Paris working for a company that worked on shop windows and ephemeral furniture design for perfume and luxury cosmetic brands. “After I came back to Spain where I was working on furniture design, although I didn’t stay in that job for long. Even if the brand was great and I was loving the furniture, it wasn’t really my thing to be working in a shop,” she says. “I started to work with furniture manufacturing here in Valencia, where I have learned a lot about the technical side of manufacturing. It was an enriching job where I based myself for nearly four years, up to the point of starting Yonoh with Alex.”

When asked about where inspiration strikes and what her influences are in her design work, del Portillo explained how it typically comes from day to day life but that traveling sparks it the most. “Knowing different cultures and understanding that not all people live like you makes you look at things differently,” she says.

Yonoh is a multidisciplinary studio that produces a varied portfolio of designs stretching across different industries from furniture to products. They have worked with numerous big brands in the industry, including Vibia and Bover in Spain, Flos and Foscarini in Italy and Zero and Louis Poulsen across Europe. “We have had the chance of working with some great lighting companies across the world,” she adds.

When asked about lighting, it is clear this design process plays a fundamental role in del Portillo’s repertoire. “Working with light is different to working on any other product because they are objects that are sometimes on and sometimes not,” she says. “We have to think about it and make the lamp work well in both conditions.” When referencing what lighting should bring to a space, del Portillo adds that “the most important aspect is to create an ambience with light. It really depends on which space you’re illuminating but creating a comfortable ambience for us is the most important part.

“Architectural and decorative lighting are complementary, and both are necessary for a perfect ambiance. Decorative is more important in interiors with its main goal to create a relaxing and restful space. Architectural is more for hospitality and contract use, but we always find a mix of them in every project.”

As a young studio, the pair approach each project with fresh eyes and deliver an end result that both features a subtle design style as well as a solution for their client. “I think we have a little design style that we try to adapt for each client. When they call us, it is usually because they like what we do. But, at the same time they want something that fits with what they already have. All our projects are influenced by all of our other projects we are doing or have done, as well as the collection of companies that we have worked for. Everything is mixed.”

Further to the mixed approach to each product and client project, del Portillo has also observed that the current trends across interior design both in Spain and internationally is the idea that having no trend is the trend. “Nowadays, everything is fine – every style, every mix. We have minimalism and maximalism and then industrial and brutalism, and they all fit together. I think that’s the trend – no trend,” she adds.

Next in the pipeline for the design duo is a collection of furniture and lighting for both indoor and outdoor applications. In the early stages of planning and designing, del Portillo and Selma both factor in and question what is more important for the design's purpose. “Shape is nothing without function. Design wouldn’t be design without function, that’s the most important.

“We always say that a lamp must be beautiful when switched off, but even more beautiful when switched on.”

Both del Portillo and Selma are young designers with a young studio, but both bring a well established history of design knowledge that has set them in good stead to tackle all projects that cross their paths. “The most rewarding part about working in design is to see that people like what you have done, they buy it and use it. Walking around and seeing your products in a shop window or used in a bar or hotel…That’s really exciting!” concludes del Portillo.

www.yonoh.es

by Sarah Cullen

Matt Kavanagh

London Designer Matt Kavanagh introduces a new style of sustainable lighting made from discarded NOS cannisters.

The NOS Sphere 228 chandelier is part of a range of upcycled lights created by London designer Matt Kavanagh; the idea for which came to him while cycling the streets of London. “I had been seeing these canisters littering the streets for ages and at the back of my mind thought it was an incredible waste of a beautifully engineered component,” Kavanagh tells darc. “Then, last summer there was a BBC news article about the clean up on the beach after Brighton Pride and how 150 sacks of the canisters had been retrieved. I decided it would be a fitting project to make them into something beautiful and luxurious. A celebration of the illicit!

“The initial idea for the chandelier came from a conversation with fellow designer, Rupert Matthews. The canisters have a ready made droplet shape that lends itself to a hanging chandelier. The reflective surface provides a mirrorball quality that plays to the strengths of the canister and it has just the right amount of scale and 'difficult' about it to produce a valuable and luxurious final piece, which is a nice contrast to what is a discarded item found in the gutter.”

Sustainability and upcycling has been completely central to the NOS Sphere chandelier for obvious reasons as Kavanagh explains: “Sustainability is always part of the design process to varying degrees. I certainly take the responsibility of not contributing to landfill seriously and avoid projects that result in short-term use. Sometimes this is a material or production choice but it should also be an aim of designers to challenge the value of what they create in the first place so the life is extended.

“As designers, I believe we should be challenging whether a product really adds value in the first place. If you take the environmental argument to its logical conclusion, we should be making less stuff, so not designing products that don’t add value is a good start. We should also be considering material and production choice more carefully. 'Sustainability' is a fashionable label to attach to everything at the moment and there is a lot of lip service paid to this without looking at the whole picture.”

Kavanagh started his design journey at Southern Polytechnic in London where he gained a degree in engineering product design. “I was about 17-years-old when I first became aware of the Italian design movement Memphis," he says. "I was inspired, confused, provoked as it was so different to anything I’d seen. From that moment I was led to study design at college before travelling to Italy to work for Olivetti and then embark on a furniture design career that led me to work with many Italian manufacturers for over a decade.” 

This early exposure to design led Kavanagh to set up a furniture, lighting and product design consultancy, which eventually formalised as design partnership Diplomat in 1999. At the same time, Kavanagh was also working with numerous companies in the retail sector - specialising in design, brand strategy and customer research - until eventually establishing retail consultancy Space 11 in 2011; today, he splits his time between both enterprises, working from his Deptford studios.

Kavanagh's design influences have, in his own words, always fluctuated: “On the one hand I was drawn to rule breakers who tore up our conception of how to behave as designers. Makers like Ron Arad, experimenters like Geatano Pesce or the poet of light himself; Ingo Maurer, reminded me to look beyond what’s currently in the landscape. But then, my engineering training would love the iconically simple designs of Achille Castiglioni and the paired down simplicity of Alberto Meda, who was able to combine efficiency and beauty into a perfectly distilled solution.

“I love to design, but what I’ve found most rewarding over the years is meeting and collaborating with bright minds and skilled hands, from clients to fellow designers to manufacturers and crafts people. I constantly feel I’m learning from experts around me.

“Chair design for me is the ultimate product challenge in that it’s just about the oldest product typology. Usually they are in every room and are a key part of the interior aesthetic and yet we constantly find reasons to reinvent it. Like the chair, ‘the light’ has an iconic design product status as it is an equally old product typology, defines the space it sits within and is constantly revisited by designers, however it brings with it some added complexity as the technology behind light sources is constantly evolving from flame to LED. For so many years the lamp (light bulb) shape defined our approach to designing light fittings.”

During the early years of his career, Kavanagh designed commercial light fittings for a company that exclusively used metal halide, which was the efficient technology at the time. “I suspect those fittings were thrown out as better technologies arrived," he says. "For a designer this is a frustration as, unless you take the approach of designing a beautiful object that glows, the design of the fitting has a relationship with the light source and so it isn't an optimum situation to have to later change the light source to LED for instance. For this reason you can also keep returning to lighting design with completely new eyes.

“For me, a lighting product should bring form, function, emotion, use, re-use to a space rather than the traditional ‘form follows function’.”

Looking back at the design process for NOS Sphere 228, Kavanagh explains to darc how working with discarded canisters quickly provided him with problems and a number of technical challenges. “I had to find the best way to consistently hang the canisters, getting the optimum scale and shape and then, balancing the finishes and most importantly, integrating the right lighting to show off the chandelier and illuminate a space," he says. "I think in the end I must have made six iterations of design before it felt right. As well as this, though at a glance the canisters look the same, they are from different sources around the world and vary dimensionally. The puncture holes are also randomly applied, so in order to hang them consistently - the best method was to machine and thread each one and then make a bespoke threaded insert from which they could be attached to the suspension line.”

The canisters also had varying degrees of damage through crushing, scratching and surface corrosion. As such, it was important that Kavanagh found a way of grading and treating them so that the end chandelier has a consistent and luxurious feel. "Most of the canisters are bright zinc-plated so in the end I selected only the canisters without dents or too much scratching and then polished each one,” he says. “This added a uniform sparkle but still reveals some of the character that they have from being recycled."

Kavanagh also didn’t want the light source to visually define the appearance of the chandelier and so chose a recessed LED spotlight fitting incorporated within the ceiling fixing; a high wattage dimmable GU10 lamp with a narrow beam was used so that the light was focused on the sphere.

“This had the effect of highlighting its decorative quality but had a couple of added benefits in that it produced a dispersed reflection from the canisters (like a subtle mirror ball) and created a dappled silhouette pattern on the floor below it,” he says. “Given the fluid quality of the suspended canisters any gentle movement in the chandelier is then animated.”

While each chandelier is handmade, requiring considerable craft input and relying on a source of recycled components, Kavanagh is keen to highlight that this is not a one-off creation, with the process designed to be repeatable and a production luminaire for specification in interior projects.

“The design also allows for further development of the concept," he says. "The first launch was the NOS Sphere 228, created with 228 canisters, the next is the NOS Sphere 348 with 348 canisters, nearly doubling the size of the chandelier. There are also variables to the finish that can be introduced, such as combining different grades of canister. You find some that have a pink coating and others that are painted. It adds further character to the chandelier to play with this mix. I’m looking at other finishes such as gold plating for a really 'bling' audience. Then there is an opportunity to undertake bespoke commissions to suit interior spaces."

For Kavanagh, good product design should include "form, function, emotion, use, and re-use," and as such is playing with the idea of using recycled cardboard in some products and lighting. Summing up his experience of working with light, he tells darc: "I find it a combination of conventional product design and playing with mood, in that the light you cast in a space can transform the function of the environment and the emotion of those who enter it."

www.diplomatdesign.com / www.space11.co.uk

by Sarah Cullen