Our Products Will Be Retailing In Singapore From September 2021
A tête-à-tête with designer Arjun Rathi on selecting the right lights, his new studio in Mumbai, and his plans to export his truly ‘Made in India’ products to Europe and other overseas markets.
How important is human-centric lighting in our daily life? And how can it help us to remain more productive on a day-to-day basis?
Human-centric lighting is something that lighting designers have always remained focused on, which elucidates on the principles and remarks that lighting is first functional, post which its ambient or decorative nature takes over. But with functional lighting, you have to plan lighting in different areas of your apartment or your office as per the requirements. If you are going to light up a kitchen, you need it to be functional as well because there’s a lot of work happening. When you’re lighting up a dining area, you want the ambiance, but you also want equal lighting on your dining table surface. So, in that sense, you have to maintain a convenient relationship between function and aesthetics in such scenarios.
We see that good lighting design takes into account the sensorial profile of its occupants. What are some of the other factors which matter?
It’s very important to understand the dimensions of the space because when you see your building apartments, most of them are relatively the same. But when you go for private houses that are being built in Tier-II cities, every space is different. You have to understand the volume that you’re going to illuminate. The next important thing to understand from the client’s perspective is the color of the light. In India, clients are very demanding, they’re specific, like color, there’s a certain generation of clients who have grown up in tube lights and CFL era, they really like their white light, there are certain clients who like the yellow light. Understanding color temperature is also important. There’s this whole concept of circadian lighting, which has become very popular. Circadian lighting means that the lighting design is synced up to the human body’s sleep cycles. In the evening, warmer tones, yellow tones are more calming to the mind and in the daytime, more white light activates the mind.
For new homeowners who wish to rev up their interiors but have limited knowledge of lights and lighting design, what would you like to say?
The timings for which the residence is being used are of great importance to arrive at the right decision. A lot of people are working from home. When you’re working from home, you’re spending more time in your home. Earlier, when we used to go to offices, we used to leave in the morning and be back in the evening. More time was spent in the evenings at home, that’s why ambient lighting and OLS gained a lot of importance. Now, most people are creating separate work areas in their homes because of the work from home concept. In that sense, lighting has to be very well thought of. For your function, do you want it to be ambient or otherwise? A choice has to be made. It is best in the homeowner’s interest to denote each room with a designated function as it will help him/her choose the right kind of lighting. One more thing for new homeowners to keep in mind is that you don’t need to light up your full house else it starts to look like a retail store. You can just light up certain zones. If you like spending time in your living room, use some tanning lamps in your living room to create the accent right. Use spotlight for functional lighting, if you’re doing something in your dining area, use a nice decorative fitting to give you the ambient lighting, so just try and identify the function and then react to it with the right kind of lighting as a response.
You have opened a new studio in Chembur. Can you tell us more about it?
Christened as The Rural Modern Glass Studio, the new studio takes inspiration from rural Indian culture. All the colors and textures from rural India converge and turn into modern objects and products. The studio will also allow us to offer glass accessories and glass objects; now we’ll also be experimenting a lot with glass, a lot of our collaboration will be with glass artists, to see how we can produce different and unique shapes of glass, which are created by the artists which we will use with our lighting. There’ll be a lot of collaboration happening with artists in the coming months to create very artistic forms of lighting.
We have also envisioned the studio as a space where designers can come with their concepts, and experiment with glass. We hope to give rise to a new generation of glass artists or designers who otherwise did not have access to the glass.
Are you planning to make lighting products available beyond the borders?
Yes, right before last year’s pandemic, in March, we were about to retail our products in a store in London. We are still in process of setting that up. In between the lockdown, we have signed a contract with a store in Singapore. So, from September 2021 onwards, our products will be retailing in Singapore. We are also in talks with a US company. Hopefully, in a couple of months, our products will be retailing in the USA as well. We are already retailing out of all the metro cities Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Bangalore to various retailers and we are already available on a lot of online platforms as well. We’ve been really geared up in the last year and plan to export our products to Europe and other overseas markets.
What are you currently working on what are the projects you’re currently working on?
We have some very exciting projects which materialized in the last one and a half years during the lockdown phase. We are in process of finishing a 1600 square foot chandelier in Calcutta for a banquet that will become one of the largest chandeliers in the country. There’s a very tall chandelier which is almost 40 feet we are doing for a private residence in Bangalore. Secondly, we’ve also launched a new lighting collection in February, inspired by Indian candy and desserts, called ‘The Sugar Collection’. One of the most loved pieces in this collection is the striped Bullseye. Mimicking the popular mint candy, these were created by Czech glassblowers and come as table lamps and hanging lights.
