How did the journey with Santa & Cole begin?
Nina Masó (NM) More than three decades ago, my husband and I decided to combine our creative talents with my friend Javier Nieto Santa to launch our own design editing company. I was an interior designer, while my husband, Gabriel Ordeig Cole, was a designer and artist; the two of us had collaborated on a lot of restaurants and nightclubs in our hometown of Barcelona.
Back then, the city’s dining scene was undergoing a bit of a revolution, and we had a particularly warm light that became very popular with restaurants like El Boliche, Al Dente and the Bijou cocktail bar. Gradually, our work became recognised in other cities including New york and Paris, and in 1985 our company was formally launched as Santa & Cole.
You work with more than 80 internationally acclaimed designers and a lot of their ideas take years to develop. Can you tell us more about your collaborative process?
NM One way is that the designer comes to us with an idea and we develop it with them—it becomes a collaboration between their creativity and our knowledge of the market. Otherwise, we’ll think about what kind of light we feel we need and then commission a designer to come up with a concept. In either case, the most important thing is always the end product, not the name of the designer attached to it.
(Related: 5 Minutes With... Jean-Marie Massaud)