Here, Zupanc has just "redesigned" As, a restaurant and lounge bar in the heart of the city. As we meet amid the furniture she has designed and the Black Cherry lamps, Zupanc is bright, smiling and attractive (in fact she is often the "testimonial" for her design, photographed with her work, perhaps at one of her much-loved lakes in the mountains as was the case with the recent Bubble Lamps), she is wearing jeans and carrying a bag by another young and famous Slovenian designer, Lara Bohinc, who now lives in London. "Of course we know each other" says Zupanc, "I'm happy to carry her bags and necklaces because they look like me".
Lisa Corva: Why a cherry lamp?
Nika Zupanc: I got the inspiration from a song I kept listening to, Black Cherry by Goldfrapp. I started from there to create pieces that were functional and modular — the cherries have been designed for 1, 2 and 3 lights — but filled with poetry".
The feather duster is one of the first objects I designed, along with the Maid Chair, that I presented at the Salone Satellite in 2007, Marcel Wanders and Moroso really liked it. Wanders wanted to produce it for Moooi but we had to abandon it because it was too expensive. It was there that he told me, looking at the lace decoration — that I took up in the Lolita lamp — that this was in my DNA.
He meant that taking elements that are extremely feminine, almost clichés — lace, bows, hearts — and using them in a way that is almost masculine. It is one of my possible alphabets, one kind of handwriting.
Ljubljana is a city of architects. The genius loci of the city is Jože Plecnik, who also founded the first university of architecture and from the 1930s onwards designed bridges, churches, libraries as well as street furniture, chairs and lamps. Have you ever been inspired by anything by him?
No, but it's true that Ljubljana is a city of architects: I married one (laughs). My inspiration though if anything is from the 1980s, the artistic group Neue Slowenische Kunst, it was a great time to live in Ljubljana, I was a little girl, too young to take part but I took in that atmosphere.
Taking elements that are extremely feminine, almost clichés — lace, bows, hearts — and using them in a way that is almost masculine: it is one of my possible alphabets, one kind of handwriting
Maybe. But nostalgia revisited. Like when in Plecnik's pavilion at Villa Bled, on Lake Bled — about an hours from here, a wonderfully retro place, it was Tito's residence — one afternoon sitting with a cup in my hand, I imagined chairs that recounted the ritual of tea and the passing of time. The 5 o'clock collection was born, covered in roses, for Moooi.
It is right outside the city centre, in the forests of Šmarna Gora, about ten minutes away, I go and walk there every day. I check the exact time of the sunset on my iPhone so I can be there when the light changes, in time for the last rays of sun, my perfect moment of inspiration.
Your latest design?
The Bubble Lamps that I presented at the last Salone del Mobile, at the Rossana Orlandi space. In pink glass because I wanted to recreate the poetic light of the lamps on the canals of Venice, a city I love. The lamps were born there, apart from anything else, in the Vistosi foundry, born where I dreamed of them.