Hospitality Design - August 2017 - 81

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david weeks
By Matt Dougherty
Photography by Robert Bean

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1. The new Akimbo
pendant features a large
bottle shade that rotates
320 degrees.
2. The Waaw armchair is
handwoven using nylon
fishing cord locally
sourced from Dakar,
Senegal.

UNCHARTED
TERRITORY

3. The Kopra Standing
lamp features a cluster
of variously sized black
shades resting on three
steel legs.

New ground for the master of lighting

Decades into his career as a well-known and
in-demand lighting designer, David Weeks
is still able to push boundaries. He credits
his first job with jeweler Ted Muehling for
showing him "how you can connect design,
art, and craft and have it not be typical craft,
typical art." Since then, he has been working
within the "untrodden ground right in the
middle," he says.
The Brooklyn-based designer opened his
eponymous studio in 1996 after a successful
showcase of his desk lamps at ICFF, which
led to an opportunity to create a custom light
fixture for one of architect Robyn Owen's
projects in Tribeca. Lighting was the "perfect
companion" to jewelry, he says, allowing for
"the sort of elegance and detailing you can
get away with in jewelry. It exists on its own,
floating above your head with very little
physical demands on it."
The Georgia-bred, Rhode Island School
of Design grad didn't want to limit himself
to only lighting, however, and spent his time
reading books about furniture design. "I [felt]
like I initially confined myself, which in the
end wasn't good for me," Weeks explains. He
started exploring other types of products,
including a range of wooden animal pieces,
abstract sofas and ottomans, and in 2012, his
larger-than-life Cubebot, which he showcased
at Salone in Milan.
Thanks to an invite from Senegalese

designer Abdul Salam Gaye to work in his
studio, Weeks is continuing to expand his
design lens. "I got off the plane at noon and by
6 p.m. we had built a chair," he says. Despite
being from different countries, "there's that
great language that exists between makers,
whether you can speak [the same language]
or not, you can sketch [a design] or move your
hands from one corner to the next and they
understand what you want to change about it."
From that trip, Waaw was born. The
collection of woven furniture and pendant
lighting is made with locally sourced nylon
cord with subtle African influences; more
colorful, fun, and upbeat iterations of the
collection are in the works as well. Waaw, it
turns out, brought Weeks back to what drew
him to design in the first place: freedom of
creativity. "Modern design is almost always
planned out to the end, and there's very little
room for improvisation," he says, but for this
"we did it on our own. We didn't have some
money man who was waiting to see what
we'd do. It was really incredibly exciting." hd

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d av i dweekss t udi o. com

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