Nightworks Studio isn’t yet a household name in Christchurch, but the team are designing and making cutting-edge lighting that’s winning awards on the global stage. Cityscape heads behind the scenes to shed some light.

Perhaps the most prominent feature in the foyer of the restored and renovated Public Trust Building is its chandelier. Drawing inspiration from Morse code, it consists of five long polished brass pieces, each broken up by dashes of sandstone and luminescent dots. It is elegant and refined, but with a raw quality to the rough-hewn ends to the lowest of the sandstone pieces.

It lends a warmth and classic feel to the entrance of the 1925 heritage building, but on closer inspection, the chandelier is incredibly modern, with irregular distribution and lengths, and clean lines throughout. It’s a duality that can only come from very skilled design and immaculate craftsmanship.

When Cityscape visits Nightworks Studio, the team are busy polishing machined pieces of brass at a cork-topped table in the workshop. The studio is in a classic piece of Christchurch architecture, a 1974 David Allen building in Oxford Terrace. The Nightworks space won a Silver Award at the 2021 Best Design Awards. It’s well-lit by the beautiful lights suspended from the exposed concrete ceiling and fixed to stone panels on the wall. The large room is divided by two simple white curtains, separating the sitting area from the computer pod in the middle, and the workshop at the far end.

“The space itself was a pokey '90s office with an ugly commercial carpet and a false ceiling,” says business co-director Ben Wahrlich. “We stripped the whole thing out to create a blank canvas that honours the original architecture.”

This is indicative of the no-compromise design approach Nightworks Studio takes. The products are beautiful and practical, simple to assemble and dissemble with few moving parts. The development that goes into each one is lengthy and considered. How does the light perform? How do the pieces come together? What material will serve it best? What finish?

Ben takes out a prototype of a new product and lays it on the table. It’s an irregularly-shaped piece of flat stone with a brass fitting and a glass dome containing a custom LED module. “We went through about 15 prototypes, just on the dome to ensure we got the right spread of light,” he says.

The product, yet to be released to the market, is called Offcut, and it is literally made of stone offcuts from benchtops, vanities and feature walls.

“We’ve got these local stone workers we go to,” Ben says. “We take these offcut pieces, and we’re breaking it up to these really rough and organic edges. It highlights the beauty of the stone. There’s a kind of brutality and rawness about it… It’s a nice juxtaposition between the refined glass and the raw stone.”

Offcut is a real statement piece, it’s somewhat provocative, he says. He sees this development as an essential part of the design game. “It’s practical art. Our business is at the forefront of global trends.”

But that doesn’t mean they’re just throwing it at the wall to see what sticks. The team has been working on the design for over a year, and testing the water to make sure there’s demand for something so unique. “We’re trying not to do something just for the sake of being different.”

Ben and his wife Kiri are originally from Christchurch. Ben studied computer-aided design at Ara, and Kiri studied graphic design. They started the business in Sydney in 2008, but moved home so their two young boys could have a better connection to nature. They still run the Sydney office remotely, and distribute Nightworks products throughout Australia and New Zealand.

They opened the Christchurch headquarters in 2020, just after the first lockdown. “As more and more people are finding out about us, we’re growing quite rapidly,” Ben says.

Despite winning several international design awards and manufacturing world-class products, Nightworks Studio flies under the radar on the Christchurch scene. Not to worry though – the products are on the lips of architects and designers, and they’re popping up in cool projects around the city including the new Seven restaurant in the Muse Art Hotel, and plenty of residential designs.

“The good quality stuff we’re putting into the universe is something we’re really proud of.”

nightworksstudio.com