How many new things should we actually be making? This is the question that plagues so many designers now as the issues facing our planet continue to worsen. “I find the design industry very troubling in a lot of ways, and I do feel the tension of creating new pieces in a world of excess, with the majority of furniture and lighting ending up in landfill. It’s really hard to reconcile sometimes,” says Kate Stokes, co-founder for Melbourne studio Coco Flip. To avoid as much negative impact as possible, while still creating beautiful pieces that bring joy to others, she and partner Haslett Grounds produce their own works to order in very small batches and minimize waste wherever they can. Collaborating with historic local manufacturers, artisans, and small businesses, the duo takes their time and exercises their curiosity to create furniture and lighting they describe as “poetic,” “uncomplicated,” and “softly spoken.”

Stokes initially studied architecture, but soon found that her calling lay in industrial design. “Where architecture had felt overwhelming and slow-paced, the scale and timeline of designing furniture, lighting, and objects felt right for me,” Stokes says. “It’s the combination of anthropology, design, materiality and production processes that draws me in — an object is never just an object.” With a lack of career options in Perth after graduating, she founded Coco Flip to design, produce and sell her own work. Now the studio is based in a two-story building in Northcote, Melbourne, that acts as a workshop, office, and showroom. 

The studio frequently participates in the annual Melbourne Design Week, an event of ever-growing significance for the Australian creative community; for the 2023 edition, they launched an experimental lighting series titled Linear, which was born from a visit to a 100-year-old pleating factory in Williamstown, Victoria, that was on the brink of closing. To help revive the business, Stokes and Grounds came up with a contemporary application for the traditional process. Each of the lights in the Linear set includes a pleated linen panel — either vertical or horizontal — that acts as a diffuser to create a warm, soft glow within a simple wooden frame.

This is one of several Coco Flip collections influenced by historic production facilities and craftspeople in their local area. The Honey collection, a series of lights resembling the stepped concentric rings of honey dippers, arose following a tour of a 160-year-old pottery in Bendigo, also in Victoria. And for their most recent line, Dancer — the most recent addition to the Sight Unseen Collection — the work of Melbourne-based ceramic artist Belinda Wiltshire was a major influence. Her combination of midfire clay and black iron oxide brushwork, and the influence of Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, informed pieces that evoke movement and take cues from the ballet’s wildly expressive and geometric costumes. “For us, it’s more about the discovery of these special people and places and the challenge of how we can best use their skills and expertise to create something really meaningful,” says Stokes. “It’s not always the easiest way to do things, but we find it the most rewarding.”

SHOP COCO FLIP’S DANCER LIGHTS HERE!