Andreea Avram Rusu’s work begins at the intersection of form, function and feeling. “Lighting is fascinating because it is both tangible and intangible: There is the physical object, the atmosphere it creates, and the way it activates space and creates mood,” the Brooklyn-based founder of Avram Rusu Studio tells Business of Home. “That tension remains central to how I think about design.”
Born in Bucharest, Romania, Avram Rusu moved to the United States with her family when she was just 9 years old, settling in Boulder, Colorado. An early lover of fine art, she studied architecture at The University of Texas at Austin and began experimenting with lighting while working at architecture and interiors firms. “I kept encountering rooms where lighting felt like a missed opportunity: either purely functional or added as decoration after the larger spatial ideas had already been resolved,” she says. “I wanted to see illumination that was integrated, sculptural and essential to the experience of the space.”
She launched her namesake studio in 2004 with a collection of handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces sold through the online gallery Clodagh Design. Two years later, she debuted Float, a series of glass-and-aluminum chandeliers, at ICFF. “My earlier works became one-offs because they were difficult to reproduce,” she says. “Float was intentionally clean-lined and became a self-directed education in machining, custom components and how to translate an idea into something that could be made consistently without losing its character.”
For Avram Rusu, inspiration can come from anywhere—a material, a memory or an object. The Continuum series, for instance, grew out of the graffiti tags she saw on buildings near her Brooklyn loft, while the Botanica collection was inspired by the flowers and plants she encountered in Lisbon’s historic botanical gardens. “Marea draws on childhood summers at the Black Sea—[my love of] scuba diving and my longstanding fascination with jellyfish and underwater life,” she says.
Working with a small team of in-house artisans, she assembles each sculptural fixture by hand—from hardware and glass shades to wiring—inside her Greenpoint studio. “We also collaborate with a circle of craftspeople whose expertise is essential to the final result, including metal fabricators, machinists and finishers,” she says. “I have worked with glass artist Adam Holtzinger of Keep for more than a decade; he produces most of our handblown glass with a glassblowing and cold-working team at UrbanGlass.”
Avram Rusu also designs furniture and decorative objects, from a Stonehenge-inspired coffee table with monolithic metal legs to an artful line of hand-knotted rugs created in collaboration with Samantha Gallacher of Miami-based rug brand Art+Loom. “These designs allow for a slightly freer kind of experimentation—one without having to solve for wiring, illumination and complex structural systems,” she says.
After collaborating—and bonding—she and Gallacher began percolating on the idea of opening a salon-style space where they could present their permanent collections in an interiors-savvy setting. The result is Untold Editions, an artist-led gallery in New York’s Flatiron district that showcases both brands’ work alongside pieces from a rotating roster of independent designers. “The installations will continue to evolve, which keeps the space alive,” says Avram Rusu. “For me, Untold Editions is both a way to place the work in a richer context and a way to build the kind of generous, collaborative design community I want to be part of.”
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