Photo by Andrew Meredith
Nika Zupanc is a Slovenian designer who’s been steadily and unsurprisingly making a name for herself in recent years. After graduating with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2000, she quickly gained recognition for her curvaceous and fairly feminine Lolita lamp for Moooi. Just this year Zupanc partnered with Sé on an unforgettable collection of furniture that won ICFF Editors Awards’ ‘Best Furniture’ category, as well as launching a 20-piece capsule collection for Japanese brand Francfranc. In this week’s Friday Five, Zupanc gives us a taste of the very things she loves and holds dear.
Photo by Nika Zupanc
1. Forest
There is a mountain very near my home, overgrown by beautiful forest, that changes its appearance and colours with each coming season. I tend to hike in this mountain almost every day, it takes 30 minutes up and 30 minutes down. I see it as my walking meditation, as my connection to the universe. It is here, that I get most of my ideas, solve problems, envision projects, listen to the trees and speak with the birds. No way I could ever move to another city, as I cannot take the mountain with me.
Photo by Nika Zupanc
2. My bikers’s jacket with a pink and white rose
The jacket is my magic coat and the rose on it is my expression of freedom, if I borrow the expression from Nicholas Cage as ‘sailor’ in Wild at Heart by David Lynch.
Photo by Boris Krpan
3. Cars
I share life with men, who are always obsessed with cars. Their love and attention to the details of car design and production has become part of my every day life and also a source of my inspiration. So recently, whenever I am asked what I would really love to design in the future, the answer is always the same: a car.
Photo by Codognato
4. Codognato jewelry
Venice is the only city I could maybe trade for my mountain. Sometimes, I go there just to have a coffee and to visit (again and again) the Codognato boutique. The Codognato jeweler’s has been a landmark of Venice for over a century. It remains a distinguished island in a city whose heart has tended to erode. It was back in 1866 that Simeone Codognato decided to open his shop in the very same spot where it stands today. More than a business venture, it was an act of faith. Attilio Codognato is the current owner, from closely following creative evolutions, and welcomes to his display windows everything which strikes his imagination. Skulls – chained to ivory caskets, draped in gold leaf, buckled to diamond dice, eye-sockets spliced with angry snakes – are all the fashion nowadays, but Codognato has played a big part in elevating the symbol to iconic status. It is there that I truly started to understand the meaning of ‘memento mori’. The ring on the picture is one of very dear objects I crave for, one of very few things I would really like to have.
Photo by Nika Zupanc
5. Water of any kind
I am a water girl. If it is not forest, it is the water. The ocean, the lakes the rivers. Preferably on my stand-up paddle surf board or windsurfing desk.
