It used to be that showrooms were a bit like living catalogues—a physical space where designers (and the rest of us) could see everything a brand offers in one place, from styles to swatches to finishes.
But the new Lumens showroom in San Francisco isn’t just a place to see the red lamp next to the black. Instead, in September, the retailer launched the Lumens Design Gallery, a 4,200-square-foot space in San Francisco’s Jackson Square that provides eye candy first, product assortment second.
“[The space] is not about displaying everything, but about curating moments of inspiration,” says Dana Gers, CMO at Lumens. It would be impossible to show off the digital-first retailer’s 400 brands—from Louis Poulson to Vitra—in one space anyway, so the Lumens team tasked AD PRO Directory designer Ghislaine Viñas to sift through the site and put her colorful, dopamine-doused spin on three areas of the showroom: the front windows, the foyer, and an office.
The (good) problem? Lumens has pages and pages and pages of product. But it turns out that Viñas’s way of editing down the retailer’s enormous assortment was quite simple. “I was driven by color,” she says, choosing a sunset palette of pink, orange, mustard, and red—then searching by color on the site to find the pieces that would fit her vision.
After that, she looked for designers she already liked, including Hella Jongerius. “Hella’s Vitra Polder sofa?” she says, name-checking like a true fan. “It’s freaking one of my favorite sofas.” Though it wasn’t intentional, she swears, she happened to choose women designers, from Faye Toogood to Patricia Urquiola.
Searching Lumens’s inventory by color left room for discovery, like the lollipop-shaped Lasvit light—“I’m drawn to the aesthetics of happiness,” she says—that she sourced for the windows. It also inspired new ways of displaying products. She hung rugs as wall tapestries, and sconces appeared high and low.
In many ways, by appointing Viñas as their designer in residence, Lumens is turning the idea of a showroom on its head—literally, in that a Faye Toogood baby pink Roly Poly chair hangs upside down from an oversized upholstered chain that Viñas fashioned herself. It’s conceptual and cool, even if that’s not exactly how most of us would style the piece in our own—or clients’—homes.
Further inside the gallery, which is open by appointment only, warm wood wall panels and moody color-drenched rooms provide more inspiration to replace the cold, museum-like quality that most showrooms evoke. Instead, it’s a place of discovery, creativity, and collaboration, and there’s even a full conference room for guests to gather for big ideas.
