spincasino A Japanese-Inspired, Brooklyn-Built Lighting Collection
T Introduces highlights the debut of a singular person, place or thing.
The partners in life Aaron and Irisa Na Kawabi never set out to be partners in business. After their 2014 graduation from the Parsons School of Design, where they met as students, Irisa, now 32, worked as a product designer while Aaron, 35, focused on cabinetmaking, architectural fabrication and retail interiors. But when they married and moved into an apartment-cum-studio in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in 2022, they ended up making “almost everything we needed together, from cups to chairs,” says Irisa. One highlight: a piece they now call the Cascade Pendant, a ceiling light constructed from two interlocking pieces of American maple embedded with three ellipse-shaped lanterns crafted out of kozo, a highly prized mulberry-bark paper that they source from Shikoku, Japan. Inspired by kengai, a style of bonsai pruning in which branches are trained to grow in a downward direction, as well as by the couple’s shared Asian background (both are of Chinese heritage) and fascination with Japanese design, the pendant was, says Irisa, “a true collaboration because it’s better than what either of us could have done alone.” And so, after a year of planning, they decided to launch Kawabi, a collection of handmade lighting.
Currently the line comprises four styles, including — in addition to the pendant — the 28-inch-tall Legume, a seedpod-shaped kozo-paper shade perched on a platform of American white oak, and the Souvenir, a vaguely torso-shaped floor lantern that sits between two pieces of walnut wood, with a dangling brass wind chime that doubles as a dimmer switch. The ballasting tray at its base is filled with the marble chips that Aaron uses in his bonsai rock garden.
The lights, which the couple describe as “beacons,” bear some resemblance to those designed by the midcentury Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and to vernacular Japanese and Chinese lanterns. Instead of typical bamboo ribbing, however, the couple use rattan reeds, wrapping them around a collapsible wood structure. The resulting silhouettes are organic and irregular — a departure from traditional Asian craft, which prizes exacting symmetry.
Earlier this year, the Kawabis visited Gifu, a Japanese city famous for lantern making. When they showed photos of their molds to the proprietors of a 90-year-old atelier there, “they looked at us quizzically and shook their headsspincasino,” says Irisa. That didn’t bother Aaron — though he says that the time he spent studying in Japan in college opened his eyes to the importance of designing objects that are, above all else, useful and enduring. “In Japanese culture there’s a lot of emphasis on tradition, but we’re not bound by traditional craft; we’re inspired by it,” he says. “We’re thinking about new rather than old.”
