Jake Oliveira grew up in a small town west of Toronto, in a multigenerational Portuguese household full of tradesmen, including an electronics repairman, a woodworker and an upholsterer. Sometimes instead of playing with toys, he tinkered with the various tools he could scrounge around the house, an interest that led him to pursue a Bachelor of Design at York University. “To be able to say, ‘I’d like to go into the arts,’ was not a luxury that the rest of my family [had],” he tells Business of Home. “So I definitely took it very seriously.”
After specializing in furniture at school, he went on to work for a number of design companies in Toronto before launching his eponymous studio in 2021. Now, he crafts lighting, furniture and decorative objects, and often collaborates with U.S. brands like Boyd Lighting and A. Rudin. “We have a really fantastic design industry in Canada, but we’re also quite a young country. The world for industrial designers here isn’t as developed as it is in Europe or even in America,” he says. “You can self-produce, but that’s very expensive and very risky for a lot of people. And we don’t really have companies that have been around for a very long time that are looking to facilitate and market and put out the work of designers.”
Oliveira describes his design approach as a little unconventional. Rather than the classic design school method of step-by-step problem solving, he fills his creative well by visiting museums and art galleries and putting inspiration photos and sketches on the wall, then draws until he lands on an idea that feels unique. “I really believe in taking big swings rather than trying to do something that’s very safe,” he says. Next comes the technical part—3D modeling and prototyping—before he collaborates with the brand’s craftspeople for the final product. “When you front-load yourself with all these things that inspire you, and then you let that channel through you—that’s the way that I’ve been able to come up with something that feels unique.”
One of his most recent collaborations with Boyd Lighting, the Nest collection, began as an idea of piecing glass together. “A lot can go wrong where it can chip, where it can’t be lined up, but you get this really beautiful, ethereal glow,” he says. Further inspired by a memory of glassware his mother had when he was a child, he revisited the idea and released a blown-glass collection of pendants with angular shades. Last week in Paris, Oliveira gave a sneak peek of his spring collection with the lighting brand, including a new table light. “I’ve felt for a long time that table lights are very important. They’re often rendered very functionally, and they lack emotion in a lot of cases,” he says. “I sorted out a table light that I feel very proud of.” Later this month, he heads to the Interior Design Show Toronto to debut even more products.
Despite many exciting upcoming launches, Oliveira prefers a quality-over-quantity mindset. “This past year, I came to terms with the fact that I don’t have the highest ability for output. I’ve always thought that to have a successful industrial design career, you need to be putting out hundreds of pieces a year,” he says. “And I think I could do that, but it would require growth in a way that I’m not interested in, because it would mean removing myself from the parts of my job that I really like—the actual act of designing. If I put out three really thoughtful collections a year, that’s plenty for me.”
