Hasta La Ideas

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. We’ll be posting a new interview every other Tuesday.

Name: Brendan Ravenhill

Occupation: I’m a designer—everything from products to furniture to lighting to interiors.

Location: Los Angeles

Current projects: We self-produce four distinct lighting families that vary in range from sconces to chandeliers, and from elegant to practical. We’re developing a new family of lights for winter 2014, in response to a number of inquiries we’ve gotten for even more dramatic fixtures that are designed to be adjustable. We hope to preview the line this fall.

We’re also currently designing barstools, tables, banquettes and chairs for several restaurant projects, and developing a new cast bronze bracket that can be used in a number of different configurations. The bracket grew out of a meeting with a talented metal caster here in L.A. When we find a local manufacturer to work with, it often starts a whole creative process of figuring out what we can make using that individual’s particular manufacturing skill and capability.

Mission: What really motivates our work is how material properties and manufacturing methods can drive a design and an aesthetic. We try to celebrate that and bring that out in the work, rather than trying to hide it. So I’d say my mission is to create objects that have a kind of inherent truth to them, that speak about all the various parts that create the whole.

The Black Counter Stool is the newest member of Ravenhill’s Black Chair family

The Hood Chandelier—one of Ravenhill’s latest lighting products—uses white oak, polyethylene shades, a brass wiring hub and cloth-covered wiring.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I have an undergrad degree in sculpture, and for years I was a wooden boat builder. I went back to grad school for design because I loved building things but I was really attracted to the idea of being able to mass-produce objects and furniture. So I went to grad school in 2007 with the idea of being a designer, and I started my own company soon after graduating in 2009.

Education: I went to the Rhode Island School of Design for a master’s in industrial design.

First design job: While I was in grad school, I designed a bottle opener that got licensed by Areaware. The bottle opener was one of my thesis objects—my thesis at RISD was about investigating objects that, through wear and use, develop a patina and increase in value. The bottle opener was a simple object that I created to investigate some of those material properties. I made eight and gave them out to friends, and one made its way to Areaware and they picked it up for licensing. That was my first “licensed object” job.

Then when I moved out to L.A. in 2010, I got a job to design a restaurant, because the owner had seen my bottle opener in a magazine. That’s what jump-started my business—some of my earliest work that I’m now still producing came out of that project.

Who is your design hero? I have a lot of design heroes, but someone who I really look up to his Nathaniel Herreshoff. He was a wooden boat builder who not only had amazing mastery of form, in making really beautiful and fast boats, but he also had his own manufacturing capabilities in Rhode Island, where he constantly pushed materials and methodologies in boat building. So as much as he was an innovator in new forms, he was also an innovator in how to create those forms. He was an early and huge influence on my design career.

Inside Ravenhill’s studio in his Los Angeles home

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