Marcel Wanders and Gabriele Chiave Talk About Their New Nightbloom Collection for Lladró

Marcel Wanders Studio is no stranger to collaborative design. Wanders, an Interior Design Hall of Fame honoree, frequently works with the likes of Alessi, FLOS, and most recently, Lladró. Together with his Creative Director, Gabriel Chiave, Wanders sat down with Interior Design at Salone del Mobile to talk about the surreal Nightbloom lighting collection the duo designed for the Spanish ceramics company. 

“We tried to find a way to just show the character of our collaboration, the character of Lladró and ourselves in the best way possible,” Wanders said of conceptualizing the collection.

What the pair ultimately produced is a collection of pendants, wall sconces, and a floor lamp evocative of flower petals unfurling at nightfall. Capturing the essence of movement was a key design objective of Wanders and Chiave, who were inspired by how Lladró has used a medium as rigid as porcelain to communicate motion through design.

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“The story of Lladró was very impactful in that they always tried to communicate movement, and a very exact but very still moment of certain movement of clothes, of hair, flowers of butterflies. And in a way I think that these two elements of the flower and the movement is something that came out from this project,” said Chiave.

In fact, the duo felt that this aspect of Lladró’s design ethos is what made the Nightbloom collection possible in a way that no other company would have been able to replicate—not even a Dutch company, though the Netherlands has a long-standing history of working with porcelain as a medium.

“If we would have done this with a Dutch company…there’s no Dutch company that could do anything like this. It would have become very different. It’s not because it’s Spanish. It’s because it’s Lladró,” said Wanders.

He continued, “You can find something that is authentic to the collaboration while also doing something that has never been done [before]. That’s special. That’s what we were looking for.”

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