7 minute read
Going Solo
Raffaele De Vita of Light It Design was on the verge of giving up on his dream of creating a lighting design business when his luck changed…
My life changed the day I decided to move back to Australia. I had spent a year there learning English before returning to my native Italy to study lighting design at the University of Rome.
But when I got back to Sydney, I couldn’t get a job in lighting. I was ready to give up and had actually booked my ticket back to Italy, when I sent out one final CV, to a consultancy firm called Medland Engineering. They got me in for the interview on the Tuesday or Wednesday, and by the end of the week, I got the job. So the following week, I started and like in a poker game, I was all in. From them I learned about service coordinations, electrical fire, mechanical, hydraulics. From a point of view that is also related to finishes, to being an architect, I was able to anticipate to think about what our clients, what the architect would actually expect from us in terms of coordination.
But by 2016, I was ready my own design consultancy. I was very grateful for the experience I had in the company, but I had a view on how to deal with projects, how to deal with clients, and I wanted to apply my way of doing things to the project.
So being able to actually be fully myself played a huge role for this decision. I started Light It Design in Sydney, but it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be because I had to start from scratch. You need to build new clients, you need to do business development, you need to let people know that now you're doing your own things, then you have to be mindful of the partnerships that are already in place, consultancies that have been working together for years.
So understanding where not to step onto people's toes, but also at the same time, which point you can actually push or you need to understand which companies are more suitable, which companies are more available to work with you. So it's a very long and excruciating process.
And this process, it lasted two and a half years, which is not a short period of time. And in those two and a half years, obviously you try to do the best with the projects that you manage to win.
And I had invested everything. It was a poker game and I was all in. But I was losing this time because I was not getting where I wanted to go. I wanted to build a nice lighting design firm with medium- to high-level projects.
But then one day I was invited to tender for a huge international project: the Google campus in Sydney. It’s a five-storey building with offices, an auditorium, a food court that takes up an entire floor, a cinema, a gym and countless meeting rooms.
At the time, I was at the point where it was just me. The interview process was very long and very thorough, as you’d expect from these sort of companies.
It wasn't just about showing the projects or your curriculum. It was about talking challenges. What is your opinion about this? How would you react if this were to happen? What is your opinion from a design perspective? What are your design ideas based on this preliminary concept from the interior design?
I had decided that if I didn’t win this project, I would give up on the idea of lighting design in my own company because it had taken my entire life, basically.
I had sacrificed everything just to focus on this dream of building this lighting design consultancy. And then I got the news that I had won the project. And that really was life changing.
It allowed me to start building a team really quickly, a team whose core members I’m still working with today.
And then Covid hit. And we had to find replacements for the fittings we had specified for Google as it was impossible to get the fitting shipped from anywhere.
And I'm not talking about single downlights or the track light. We had hundreds of metres of custom linear fittings with colour changes, with very precise technical requirements that we then had to find local suppliers that could actually manufacture them.
It was a huge challenge getting the project completed, but the reward was even bigger because we had managed to do it with so many constraints.
The Google project led onto others in Australia and China, including the huge Euro America Financial City Hangzhou, where we partnered with interior design practice Future Space.
The next step for me is to open in London. As a character, I don't like to feel too comfortable and I need new challenges to feel alive.
London is an excellent hub to work on projects in Europe, in Middle East and also on the other side of the ocean. It also helps that London is closer to my family in Italy.
So now I'm in London because I need to start networking, to meet industry people, and get a feel for the industry in the UK.
For me, design is about storytelling. We tell a story because every project and every client is unique.
I want to make sure that the lighting design, together with the architecture, the interior design or the landscape design, suits perfectly the client and the vision of the design team.
It's about having fun with the client and with the team, and about getting excited, but also making sure that everybody is excited as well.
‘The door opened to the paintings of Michaelangelo and I was like, I think I like this job’
De Vita grew up in a small fishing village in Puglia in southern Italy but his passion for the design world began when he studied architecture at the University of Florence in 2000.
‘I chose Florence because being able to witness in person masterpieces from Brunelleschi or breeding the same air as Leonardo or Michelangelo was a very exciting thing for a young student.’
After graduation he went to Australia for a year to learn English, returning after he won a scholarship to do a lighting design masters at the University of Rome. To top off his architectural degree and lighting design Masters, he added an industrial design master, this time back in Florence.
A professor invited him to interview for his company, and De Vita ended up working in plum projects like Vatican City, including the lighting for the Sistine Chapel. Financed by the European Union with the sponsorship of Osram and a number of European universities, the latter project lasted a number of years. ‘I was in the Sistine Chapel at night for an on site visit once,’ recalls De Vita, ‘I was with a colleague of mine and it was just us and the priest. And the priest had this huge, dramatic key that would open the door. And when he opened the door and the paintings of Michelangelo were revealed to us, I got goosebumps. And I was like, I think I like this job.’
