Sean O’Callahan, BDM for Architectural Lighting takes a look at this highly successful Italian lighting brand…
When the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza opens later this year it will be the largest archaeological museum in the world. As might be expected of a site that will house artefacts from ancient Egypt, including the complete Tutankhamun collection, every aspect of its architecture features international design of the highest quality. For unonovesette, Italian manufacturers of architectural lighting, and one of the brands represented in the U.K. by 3LR, the project is another reason to celebrate the success of its highly-regarded products.
In the relatively short space of time since the company’s creation in 2015, unonovesette’s portfolio of high-end outdoor architectural lighting creations has found favour with many of the world’s leading architectural lighting designers. The Grand Egyptian Museum, situated close to the Pyramids, is just the latest on a long list of prestigious projects that have deployed the brand’s unique products.
“The first products we designed as a company were for the high-end retail market, but we swiftly evolved to produce the high-end outdoor architectural LED lighting for which we have become well-known” says co-founder and Managing Director Geert Buch. “We manufacture our products using premium materials such as solid machined aged brass and solid stainless steel AISI316L, and have developed a unique and durable protection system for the fixtures against water ingress and electronic over-stress. They are all designed and built to last, regardless of what the elements throw at them.”
Buch estimates that around thirty percent of unonovesette’s production is dedicated to custom solutions that are designed to meet very specific customer requirements for outdoor architectural settings. The famous Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice (lighting design by Maurice Brill); Australia’s largest hotel and casino, Crown Towers Sydney (Firefly Point of View); Robert de Niro’s Nobu hotels (Isometrix), and the Datai Langkawi luxury resort in Malaysia (Lumino Design) are just a few more examples of projects where unonovesette products are used to maximum effect.
As more and more UK lighting designers discover the highly desirable properties of what 3LR considers to be some of the best high-end outdoor architectural lighting on the market, one question regularly arises. Why uno-nove–sette? What is the significance of the number 197?
Geert Buch explains:
“It’s a question we are often asked! The two founders of the company were born in the 1970s, so we had the idea of relating the name of the company to those numbers. Then one day we were having a meal discussing the subject and discovered by coincidence that the street number of the restaurant we were in was 197. That was it – unonovesette was born!”
To find out more about unonovesette’s products and projects visit https://unonovesette.it