Stickbulb Opens 10k Sq Ft Gallery, Studio, and Production Facility in Long Island City

Designed by RUX Studios in Former Historic Steel Factory

Stickbulb is pleased to announce its first-ever showroom in the booming Long Island City neighborhood of New York City. Designed by RUX Studios – the founding creative team behind Stickbulb – the gallery is part of a 10,000-square-foot space with a design studio and production facility all under one roof. The building’s industrial details, textured terracotta walls, and weathered wooden floors have been offset with the brand’s sleek, modern LED fixtures, as well as its award-winning, grand-scale Ambassador sculpture.

“It feels like the perfect home for a company that makes cutting edge light fixtures out of old wood salvaged from demolished buildings, fallen trees, and dismantled water towers,” says Stickbulb Co-Founder Christopher Beardsley.

Stickbulb’s mission has always been to build with light and use sustainable materials, and that has extended to the design of its studio. “Everything has a past life,” says RUX Studios Founder and Stickbulb Co-Founder Russell Greenberg. “Our coffee table is two giant heart pine beams salvaged from the Pullman Couch Company factory in Chicago. The step out to our garden is a stack of redwood offcuts from the Amex headquarters’ water tower at 200 Vesey Street. And we use pieces of a telephone pole from Route 66 as a bench. All of this storied wood is our inventory, temporarily held as furniture in our showroom, on its way to becoming light as Stickbulbs.”

From the street, one travels up a flight of industrial stairs and through a blackened factory door into an airy, bright, plant-filled gallery. Light floods through three large, square windows that look out over a metal scrapyard towards the Queensboro Bridge. Long theatrical curtains loosely carve the open plan into soft, intimate galleries.

Ambassador – a massive, illuminated archway crafted from 146 three-centuries-old redwood beams – greets visitors at the door. The sculpture, winner of Best in Show for NYCxDESIGN in 2017, acts like a hearth for the space, casting warm light over the entryway, lounge, and dining areas. The deep red and orange hues from Ambassador’s redwood are accented by a custom-fitted, marmalade-colored carpet and a wall of 14-foot-tall burnt orange curtains that run from the entrance to a plant-filled garden at the heart of the space.

Behind these curtains hums RUX Studios: design firm, experimental lab, and factory space. Through breaks in the panels, visitors can glimpse Stickbulb fixtures being assembled, raw lumber being hauled, and hear the occasional rip of a bandsaw. The production area is filled with rolling racks neatly packed with maple, walnut, heart pine, redwood, and oak Stickbulbs in a wide variety of lengths and styles. This mobile wood library moves around the studio with the ebb and flow of production.

Stickbulb’s newest collection, Bough, and last year’s introduction, Boom, which recently received a Red Dot Design Award, are a few of the brand’s signature fixtures on display in the showroom. The centerpiece for the office is the brand’s most popular design, the Sky Bang, a cluster of which are suspended over a 24-foot-long dining table designed and fabricated in-house. This is where the team holds meetings, design discussions, and communal lunch on Wednesdays.

Typically open by appointment only, Stickbulb will open its doors to the public during Open House New York (October 12-14), giving visitors a glimpse behind the curtain where Stickbulb creates light from wood. Special tours will be led by the co-founders Russell Greenberg and Chris Beardsley throughout the weekend including the first ever Factory Friday tours in partnership with Made in NYC.

About Stickbulb

Stickbulb is an award-winning lighting brand co-founded in 2012 by RUX Studios Founder and Creative Director Russell Greenberg and Managing Partner Christopher Beardsley as a way to combine their mutual love of architecture, modular systems, and sustainable manufacturing. Born from a pile of scrap wood, the original objective of Stickbulb was to “build with light,” which has since been fulfilled in creations for Gensler, Google, Piero Lissoni, and Amy Lau among others. Stickbulb LED fixtures are designed by RUX Studios and handcrafted in Long Island City, NYC from sleek wooden beams using reclaimed materials sourced from locally demolished buildings and sustainably managed forests. Their products range from small desk lamps to room-filling installations and can be found in a growing list of international showrooms and design galleries including The Future Perfect and Rossana Orlandi. stickbulb.com