We catch up with Canadian designer lighting brand Bocci to learn more about its recent initiatives and upcoming plans for Milan Design Week 2024
It’s been a busy few years for Bocci. Known mainly as a designer lighting brand retailed by Space Furniture, it is, in reality, an entire design ecosystem built around co-founder Omer Arbel’s design principles. It is at once a multidisciplinary design studio with projects that span various creative disciplines, a research lab dedicated to exploring novel production methods, and unveiling the hidden potential of materials such as glass, metal, concrete, fire and electricity, and much more. It has its own factory, too.
Arbel and the Bocci team are building a new headquarters to house this design ecosystem under one roof. This is on top of a fresh new logo, branding and website, as well as a new Milan apartment showroom, all of which debuted last year.
We caught up with Bocci’s sales director, Eleanor Smith, at Space Furniture ahead of Milan Design Week.
Don’t miss: 10 new design showrooms, furniture stores and home decor shops to explore in Singapore
What are Bocci’s plans for the upcoming Milan Design Week?
We’ve been exhibiting in Milan for the past 15 years, and we always built these large displays at the Fiera. But we realised how wasteful it was because we had to tear them down after two weeks. We just didn’t have a permanent home when we also found that people were more interested in visiting off-site events and seeing how the city is being activated in different ways during Design Week.
So, we purchased an apartment in an early 20th-century building in Zona Vincenzo Monti, near Rossana Orlandi, renovated it for a year and a half, and launched it last year. The idea is that it is an actual living space—you can visit, browse, stay, and sleep over. And we host parties there. This is how we feel Bocci is best experienced.
This year, we’ll redo the apartment completely. Another fun thing about the Milan project is that we also choose to celebrate our relationships in the community. Many of our friends, like Calico Wallpaper, Christian Woo, ClassiCon, De La Espada, E15, Rocky LaRock with Monte Clark Gallery, Knoll International and others, contributed to the apartment. We’ll have some new friends contributing this year, and we’ll be launching new versions of some of our existing products.