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DETAILS
Located in a high-end mall complex in the heart of Beijing’s financial district, SUBU fuses Chinese dining with a clean Scandinavian aesthetic. In the heart of the restaurant, a series of cocoons enclose guests in their own intimate space.
drum store and through this made connec- tions with a number of bands, gradually picking up jobs as the lighting designer for their gigs. At thirteen he was touring Scan- dinavia and by fourteen, he was travelling Europe. Two years later, he founded his first company, Fat Fish Lighting Design, though at just sixteen the paperwork required a signature from his, slightly bemused, moth- er. An artistic spirit with little interest in the machinations of business shareholdings, she quickly acquiesced and Torpe’s career began in earnest.
Fat Fish was soon providing all lighting design for the Roskilde Festival and later went on to create entertainment lighting design for a number of large-scale festivals across the continent. But after five years, the live touring industry began to lose its appeal. “The theatrical touring business is, first of all, incredibly hard and, secondly, very competitive, but in the wrong way; it’s not a question of how talented you are, it’s a question of what equipment you have to hand,” he explains. According to Torpe’s own mantra, “If it feels like work, you’re doing it wrong.” So
he sold the business, now a 15-employee strong crew, and began searching for his next challenge.
Initially this took the form of graphic design work, predominantly for nightclubs, but before long his involvement had expand- ed into branding the spaces themselves, creating the interior design concept and, by extension, the lighting design. Such was his conviction that Torpe actually bought a 25% share in one club complex, doing so on the condition he be granted total creative control of the venue’s iden- tity. Within a year, his ideas had pulled the business out of the red to deliver a 3 million pound turnover, a success he attributes largely to a more thoughtful approach to light. “People got an experience when they entered the club. They said, ‘Wow, this is beautiful!’ And when something is beautiful, it creates a feeling of wellbeing, a desire to relax and have a drink. If you come into a space where you have light in your face – where you feel intimidated by the light – then it has totally the opposite effect.” It was around this time that the entertain- ment industry began embracing LED lighting
with unfettered gusto, a culture of one-up- manship that Torpe had to work hard to counter. “People abuse the technology, in my humble opinion,” he says. “Instead of looking at the beauty of, say, 3000K or 2700K lighting and using the possibilities within the range to create something where we actually look good, they think: ‘Okay, now the room can be PINK. Now it’s GREEN. Now it’s BLUE.” Torpe snaps his fingers to the imagined kaleidoscopic beat. “It’s like a circus, but it doesn’t need to be. If you do something with a relaxed atmosphere and you have confidence in what you’re doing then peo- ple will love it.”
This philosophy of intelligently deployed white light formed the central theme of Torpe’s first commercial club concept, NASA in Copenhagen. He created a soft, curved interior; a series of inviting shapes bathed entirely in subtle whites, with a touch of green on the dancefloor as his only conces- sion to colour. The owners were initially sceptical, fearing the venue would appear stark and overly bright. The results were quite the opposite. With its glamorous, cosy
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