Today we’d like to introduce you to Brendan Ravenhill.
Hi Brendan, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I was born and raised in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, and moved to Washington, D.C. as an eight-year-old. My father had just taken a job as chief curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. I spoke French, but I had picked up some English from spending summers on an island off the coast of Maine.
I grew up around art and craft. My father built play structures for our school in Abidjan. From him, I learned to love and look for the art that exists in our daily lives – the hand-painted barber shop signs or wooden stools put to everyday use, which I now have a dozen of in my home here in Los Angeles. So in hindsight, it’s no surprise I went on to study Sculpture at Oberlin College, then later to do my master’s degree in Industrial Design at Rhode Island School of Design.
I decamped in 2010 for Los Angeles, drawn by the thriving network of makers and fabricators here in Southern California. That same year I established my design studio to create products that have meaning beyond aesthetics and trend. Since its founding in 2010, we’ve grown from me working alone in a spare bedroom to 15+ talented humans working out of the Studio’s 17,000-square-foot building in Glassell Park.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The Studio has always been self-funded, which is a self-inflicted kind of challenge, but I think it has led to more deliberate – albeit slower – growth. This last year, we were lucky that construction was deemed essential during the pandemic. It was really important to me to make sure the Studio stayed intact, safely. We didn’t furlough a single employee and we were able to adapt and put a structure in place that allowed us to fulfill orders and keep the company moving forward despite the challenges. Yes sales dropped, but we also cut our expenses, and we made it through. That’s all due to our incredibly loyal clients and to our team for their flexibility and determination.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We’re an American lighting design studio best known for exploring material, function, and manufacturing methods. In our body of work, we strive for a logical celebration of physics, material and craft. We’re proud to build all of our pieces in the USA.
I’ve always been inspired to create in a world already full of things because I believe that well-designed objects embody original ideas. Our fixtures are known for their backstories. Take our Church Family for example. A few years ago, I drove to the corner of Compton Avenue and 49th Street one weekday to see the Bethlehem Baptist Church designed by Rudolph Schindler. Schindler’s Kings Road house was one of the first places I visited when I moved to Los Angeles, and I’ve visited most of the architect’s buildings in the L.A. area. Schindler believed that modern materials and methods, not historical styles, should be the source for architectural form, and that spirit is also what drives our Studio’s work.
While I was taking photos of the church, the pastor at that time came out to say hello and ended up taking me inside for a tour. He was working to renovate the space and revive the congregation. Before long, we were talking lights, and in the ensuing months we created our Church Family to illuminate Bethlehem Baptist. Schindler called his work “Space Architecture,” meaning he designed not just for structure but also the climate, light and mood of an interior space. Inspired by this thinking, our Church fixtures are designed to cast light not down but up and out, with globe bulbs that are exposed and celebrated.
Any big plans?
During COVID, we had to invent a new way of working together to develop our next family of lights. So much of our design process is about meeting and talking with manufacturers who are really experts in their material and machinery but during the pandemic that wasn’t possible for us. Our Slide Family, which will launch in the fall, is our pandemic baby. Through a largely contact-free design process, we’ve produced a sculptural fixture featuring a cone shade clad in 100% cotton, perched elegantly on a brass arm. The cone comes to a simple point unaltered by hardware or finials, which gives it a purity of shape.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: brendanravenhill.com
- Instagram: @brendanravenhillstudio
