Honoring the Greats: Nika Zupanc

I've featured 5 male designers in my "Honoring the Greats" series thus far, so today I am thrilled to be sharing the work of one talented lady- Nika Zupanc.  Nika is a renowned Slovenian-based interior and furniture designer that first came on to the design scene with the launch of her Lolita Lamp at Milan Design Week 2009.  Since then, she's effectively broken in to the boy's club of contemporary furniture design.

Nika graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2000, and has since secured furniture collaborations with  Sé, Moooi, and Rossana Orlandi while also keeping busy with interiors projects and art installations, like her "Room of One's Own" exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris for Miss Dior:

More recently, her Trophy Lamp and Full Moon Lamp for Sé are all the rage.  We have spec'ed both lights for our more modern clients, and they seem to be appearing more and more in well-designed spaces.

{trophy lamp}

{full moon lamp}

Many of her furniture designs have an obvious humor and femininity to them, but there's a message behind the overt femininity- she's playfully challenging traditional stereotypes.  Zupanc's plan is to take the design language of femininity – the bows, the kitsch, the idioms of dressmaking – and use it in a very rational, functional way. "I try to take these elements to new places," she says, "to give them a new seriousness. So they could be taken as something that is relevant in the contemporary design... What I think is more important for me are two things: elegance and a restrained attitude towards those elements," Zupanc says. 

 Although she does aim to make her products "visually seductive", she adds: "I think sexiness is a very dangerous word." It's not the way she herself would present the work, but she doesn't reject the description outright: "Maybe you can also see sexiness or something erotic in it but I think you can see that in a lot of things that you adore or like."

The tension between the femininity and the stark restraint is what I love most about her work.  Here are a few of my favorite pieces:

Nika Zupanc Pieces (from left to right, top to bottom):

Pom Pon Lamp/Olympia Vanity

Stardust Armchair/Cherry Light Fixture/

Lolita Lamp/Naked Desk/

Homework Chair/Trophy Lamp/Full Moon Lamp

Serious girl boss status.  I can't wait to see what Nika comes up with next!

{all images via Nika Zupanc}

Read past Honoring the Greats posts:

Albert Hadley

Billy Baldwin

David Hicks

Tommi Parzinger

Piero Fornasetti