OHLA Studio
Giulia Zink’s (Italia, Serdeña, 1989) and Mat Trumbul’s (San Diego, California, 1983) combined knowledge of art and design, quickly took them from interior decoration to object design. In the spring of 2020, they arrived in Mexico to put the finishing touches on “Sin Nombre”, a design gallery combined with an artist residency in San Miguel de Allende, a historic city whose old town contains many preserved buildings from the colonial period. This house in the middle of a labyrinth of cobblestone streets was intended to be a place where exchange and emulation between like-minded people would foster creative impulses. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, travel became impossible and the couple was forced to settle in Mexico temporarily.
Their forced stay in Mexican territory, permeated by a warm palette of sand tones, now surrounds the creative duo’s first collection of lighting and furniture, launched at the end of 2022. The “Alcocer” collection is a celebration of crafts, such as stone carving, goldsmithing, and metal casting. “In our formal experiments, we decided to focus on the materials themselves and allow contemporary volumetric architecture to determine the design, pre-ceding any consideration of color in favor of form and finish,” explains Giulia.
Behind the modern lines of her creations made with the help of artisans and small local communities, there are a lot of references to the rich cultural heritage of Mexico and so-metimes, a definitive nod to the classic styles of Giulia’s homeland, Italy.