Lumens Plants Roots in San Francisco With an All-In-One Design Gallery
After 20 years fostering a predominantly online business, the company is bringing brick-and-mortar back with a showroom-turned-industry hub in the city’s Jackson Square neighborhood
Since its founding in 2004, Lumens has become a preeminent resource for home decor, making some of the world’s most prestigious lighting and furniture brands a mere click away. Now, after 20 triumphant years in business, Lumens is focusing on its in-person presence with a newly opened Design Gallery in San Francisco’s Jackson Square neighborhood.
While the new brick-and-mortar pays homage to the company’s beginnings—Lumens started as a small retail shop before adopting a digital-first business model—the Design Gallery marks an exciting new chapter for the brand. “We’ve always envisioned a physical space that would embody the spirit of discovery that our customers know us for,” explains Dana Gers, the brand’s chief marketing officer. “The Design Gallery is that vision realized. It’s about bringing what’s great about the e-commerce site and distilling it into a very curated, experiential space.”
Those who visit the 4,200-square-foot location will notice the Design Gallery intentionally doesn’t feel like a typical furniture showroom. Instead of packing the area with the 400-plus brands Lumens carries online, the Design Gallery was built to be an “editorial canvas”—a place where a designer’s imagination can run wild. “One of the most enticing things about Lumens is that we have this rich variety of brands, but here is where we can have creative realizations of our products,” Gers explains. “Each room you go into feels like there’s a story unfolding.”
The Design Gallery provides an opportunity to see and interact with Lumens’s offerings—Flos, Moooi, and Audo Copenhagen, among many others—but it’s also poised to become a hub for the Bay Area design community. Not only is the brick-and-mortar outfitted with areas for work and meetings, but a designer in residence program affords professionals the chance to leave their own mark on the gallery. Every six to eight months, a new designer will be selected to concoct an installation with Lumens products. New York designer Ghislaine Viñas was selected as the first participating owing to her distinctive vision. “She is incredibly creative, joyful, and exuberant in her selection of color and product,” Gers notes. “We knew she could bring that space to life.”
As expected, Viñas didn’t disappoint. The designer transformed her installation into a dimensional space visitors could enjoy and savor. “It was really carte blanche,” Viñas says of her process. “It’s special for a company to stand behind what they say and give a designer that kind of opportunity.” Curious to explore how color could energize the space, Viñas washed her exhibition in a warm, sunny palette of mustards, oranges, and pinks. Meanwhile, she cleverly suspended Driade’s pink Roly Poly armchair and Lasvit’s Lollipop Pendants from the ceilings, making her setup feel less like a showroom and more sculptural. “It was very much like a painting,” Viñas explains. “I was able to take things out of a palette and put them back in. And it was tremendously fun.”
Viñas, a longtime Lumens customer, says the opening of the Design Gallery will give visitors a deeper connection with the retailer. “You never really meet the people behind a brand if you’re online,” she says. “When you go into this space, you’re not just seeing the products in real life. Lumens becomes very personable because of the people who are there and the attention to detail they have.” The result is a design destination where connection, creativity, and color can converge in style.