Creativity runs in Andrea Claire’s family. She grew up on the North Shore of Long Island to an American father and Dutch mother. Her uncle in the Netherlands is an architect, and her great-great-grandfather was a Dutch painter. “There was always this kind of art and design thing in my family. As far as I can remember, I just had this innate interest in spaces and altering them and creating,” she tells Business of Home.
Claire went on to study architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and earned an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She worked as an architect in New York and Los Angeles—while pursuing painting on the side and designing chandeliers for The Future Perfect in its early days. Until 2008. After the economic crash, she decided to pivot and dive headfirst into a lighting business with the launch of her eponymous Brooklyn studio in 2011. “I had never worked in product design before—I was always doing architecture. I did a lot of high-end residential work, so I knew that world, and I also knew there weren’t that many people doing high-end lighting in that vein, more bespoke stuff,” she says. “So I thought there was an opportunity in that area.”
For her first collection, called Bamboo, she turned her abstract paintings into illuminated three-dimensional mobiles of bamboo wood crafted in modular frames for easy customization. Their launch at ICFF in 2011 led to several big commissions, including one for the Rosewood hotel bar in Hong Kong. In 2017 she made the move from New York to Los Angeles, where she now employs eight full-time team members.
When describing her creative method, she says: “It’s one of those mysterious things—where do ideas come from? They come from all kinds of places. Now, I work off of what I’ve done previously. Sometimes I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I like that idea, but what if we tried this.’ I love different processes. I also love materials, textures, function, form. It can come in all different ways.”
She starts her designs with drawings, reducing her ideas to their most minimal form. “Then it gets complicated again. How do you make it? What’s the material? What are the processes? Do we want to do that in the studio?” she says. “There are a million things, and I work with an engineer, and we get deep into the details, which is super fun.” Claire works with materials like Korean paper, brass, fiberglass and glass. One thing you won’t ever see in her work: a light bulb. “I hate how my eye feels when I look at a light bulb, and I don’t want to do that to anybody,” she says. “One of my goals in doing this is to make spaces really comfortable and beautiful, and looking at a light bulb is none of those things.”
Her most recent collection, Totemic, premiered at Alcova during this year’s Milan Design Week and features cast glass elements with three shade forms connected by brass armatures in a variety of finishes. Every shade is handmade using hanji, a Korean mulberry paper layered to make a textured surface that looks like marble. The collection was inspired by the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy. “He does these things in nature where he stacks rocks or pieces of ice or leaves,” says Claire. “He’ll get the leaf in different colors, create different designs around it, and then he’ll photograph it. Eventually it just blows away. I had never done a piece that was strictly vertical before, so that was interesting to me. We sell a lot of chandeliers that stretch out its face over a dining table, so it was taking a little bit of a risk, but I thought, ‘I’m going to try it. I want to see what happens.’”
Claire takes the same patient approach as she continues to build her studio, embracing the mantra “Slow and steady wins the race.” “I like the space that we’ve created. That’s really success to me—making a place to work that people like to come to, and [where] we’re proud of what we produce,” she says. “Slow, steady growth just happened. We didn’t come out of the gate and fly off; we just slowly built, and it keeps growing. I love that.”
