Subconscious Mantra by Bower Studio

Bower is a New York City-based studio that has brought a completely new touch to contemporary furniture and product design since 2013. The studio’s partners are Danny Giannella who is the co-founder and creative director; Tammer Hijazi who is also the co-founder and design director and Jeffrey Renz who is the development and sales director of the studio. Bower Studio offers unique furniture and lighting pieces but what makes them talked most is their distinctive mirror collections. How they play with rough materials such as glass and give them a fluid look are some of the features that make their collections joyful and distinctive.  Melting chairs or three-dimensional mirrors are only one of the few pieces of their collections. They don’t only make captivative and joyful pieces that are quite impossible to miss, but their pieces bring also a completely fresh atmosphere to their surroundings with the young energy they have.

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Bower Studio was founded in 2013 and its fame has been spreading widely since then thanks to your unexpected designs. First and foremost, how did the firm’s journey start?

  Tammer and I met working together as fabricators for a design-build furniture studio in Red Hook Brooklyn. We got along and worked well together. We were new to New York and as we met more people we were hired to make custom furniture and co-design with them as well. We rarely liked the ideas that people were hiring us to make, and also realized that many people don't really know what they want, they just know what they don't want.We lost patience and decided that instead of convincing others to like our ideas, we'd make things we liked and let people come to us. This was a leap for us; going from chasing the paper, to pausing and investing in ourselves. We applied to our first trade show in 2013 where we pulled together our first collection of furniture and objects to share with the world. The response was enthusiastic, and Bower was born.

Especially your 3D mirror designs made a splash, what inspired you to create such unique designs?

  We made some cutting/serving boards with painted areas that made them look like 3D shapes. There were little holes on them for hanging on your wall when not in use. They'd become decorative art on your wall when not serving their functional purposes.We loved this duality of emotional and practical functions that could exist within the same object. This seed grew into the mirrors that we've been exploring ever since. We love to infuse both the familiar and unexpected in our designs. We find that our mirrors are a nice balance of the two.

 How you use contrast materials and form the shapes distinguish your firm in each way, can you tell us about your production process?

  Our process is generally as simple as it looks. Once wedecide on form and material, we have some parts precision cut by machine, and other parts carefully handcrafted in our workshop. For us, the special sauce isin the details; the quality of the materials, the precision finishing and polishing so the light catches and traces the glass contours as you walk by, the feel of the smooth stone or wood against your skin. As with human connection, it's the little subtleties that attract people to each other, and we do all we can to enhance the interactions people have with our pieces.

The difference you made in such simple objects like mirrors and lights create joyful atmospheres in designs according to many people and this is also what they like most about you. What do you like most about Bower’s products?

  We always come back to seeing things differently and breaking ourselves and our audience out of our predictable rhythms. We think that the environment you create and live with can act as a sort of subconscious mantra that spreads into the way you see things and move through the world. We like adding a touch of magic into this mantra.

Your experimental works already brought a freshness to design industry, what is your further goal for Bower?

  Our goal is keeping it fresh. We always want to be searching and experimenting with new ideas that build upon the spirit of Bower. One future goal we're exploring is large scale outdoor pieces that are more sculptural and interactive than our past works.

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