Lighting the way for sustainable design
New Zealand’s best known furniture designer David Trubridge celebrates 20 years of his iconic pendant light
4 min
David Trubridge is not one for standing still.
Whether it’s finding his own path in seldom explored parts of the world, or reviewing the production processes of his internationally recognised lighting range, the English-born designer is, it would seem, in a constant state of movement.
That’s not to say he is always working.
For Trubridge, who has made his life in Aotearoa New Zealand, taking time to explore areas as diverse as Antarctica and Iceland through to Patagonia and remote parts of Australia, is about giving himself time just to be.
In Australia recently to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his emblematic Coral light at the Sydney Mondoluce store, as well as their affiliates in Brisbane and Hobart, he made time to take a hike through Tasmania.
“I need that ability to recharge,” he says. “I love to get right off the trail because when you stick to the path, there’s a safety factor where you know you will always find your way back.
“I want to find my own course, and see where it leads me. That’s my design philosophy too.”
Trubridge’s path to success is the stuff of legend. A self-taught designer and furniture maker, he studied naval design and had already enjoyed professional success on a small scale while living in the UK, initially creating pieces of furniture for his family and smaller clients before expanding to commissions for significant sites such the Victoria & Albert Museum and St Mary’s Cathedral In Edinburgh.
In the 1980s, Trubridge and his wife Linda decided to sell their house, buy a yacht and set sail with their two children, arriving in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1985. By 1988, he had exhibited at the National Furniture Exhibition at Auckland Museum.
As his opportunities expanded, the Trubridges sold their yacht in the early 1990s, using the money to fund building their own home — and a studio for David. Local interest in their house was such that Trubridge went on to design a number of homes in the area.
Designs for more furniture followed, notably, the Body Raft bench, which Trubridge took to the Milan Furniture Fair in 2000, where it was picked up by Italian design powerhouse Capellini.
Interested in the applications of plywood but, Trubridge turned his attention to lighting, resulting in the Coral design. Again, Trubridge made the trip to Milan in 2004, where it was warmly received — and an ‘overnight success’ story was born.
”I was a guy in a shed in the backyard when Capellini picked up the Body Raft bench,” he says. “The market for handmade furniture in New Zealand was very small and I was looking for a bigger market.”
Twenty years on, the Coral design has been joined by a range of biophilic pendant lights, including the Toru, the Navicula and the Kōura. All made from bamboo plywood and shipped out to clients in kit form to reduce the amount of packaging and space required, the lights are designed to be both sculptural and throw shadow patterns.
While the lights are highly successful commercially, it’s evident that Trubridge continues to strive for improvement, particularly in terms of environmental impacts.
“The design process does not really change much for me,” he says. “It is more important for me where we source the materials,” he says. “A lot of the embodied energy you can’t recycle. I would like to source a new material that is of our land, that is compostable and recycled. I’ve been looking at New Zealand flax which is very fibrous, like hemp.”
In the meantime, he has eliminated almost all plastics from the production process in recent years and he is exploring energy efficient lighting options beyond LEDs. For every Toru light sold, $50 goes to Sustainable Coastlines, a New Zealand charity committed to keeping the country’s beaches clean and plastic free.
While there is still much work to be done in terms of sustainability, Trubridge is hopeful.
“There is an awful long way to go but the mood is there, I think. There will be some big changes,” he says.
“We are trying to achieve sustainability and we are working towards it. We are always trying to improve and do better. How can we supply the things that people need that have the least impact?”
Only time — and more work — will tell.
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
3 min
Austin, Texas, company Core Scientific went from bankruptcy to stock market darling this year by betting on two technologies: Bitcoin mining and AI data centers. Shares are up 400%.
But if given the choice of whether to invest more in one business over the other, executives answer without hesitating: the data centers.
“We really just value long-term, stable cash flows and predictable returns,” Chief Operating Officer Matt Brown said in an interview. The company began life as a Bitcoin miner. Even though Bitcoin has been a great asset lately, it’s very volatile. By comparison, Core Scientific can earn steady profits for years by hosting servers owned by companies that sell cloud services to AI providers, Brown said.
This year, you couldn’t go wrong betting on either. Bitcoin is up 116%, and data centers are in high demand because tech companies need them to power their AI applications.
The two technologies seem to have little in common, but they both depend on the same thing: access to reliable power. Core Scientific has a lot of it, operating nine grid-connected warehouses in six states with access to so much electricity they could serve several hundred thousand homes. Other Bitcoin miners have similarly transitioned to data center hosting , but few with quite so much success.
Core Scientific’s business didn’t look quite so good at the start of the year. The company started 2024 under the shadow of bankruptcy protection. It had too much debt on its balance sheet after going public through the SPAC process in 2022 and succumbed to a Bitcoin price crash. But the company’s fortunes quickly turned around after it emerged from bankruptcy on Jan. 23 with $400 million less debt.
The company started the year focused entirely on crypto mining, but quickly pivoted as it saw demand surge for electricity for AI data centers.
In June, the company signed a deal with a company called Coreweave to lease data center space for AI cloud services. Coreweave has since agreed to lease 500 megawatts worth of space. Core Scientific says it will get paid $8.7 billion over 12 years under the deal.
Privately held Coreweave is one of the fastest-growing companies behind the AI revolution. It was once a cryptocurrency miner, but has since transitioned to offering cloud services, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. It’s closely connected to Nvidia , which has invested money in Coreweave and given the company access to its top-end chips. Coreweave expects to be one of the first customers for Nvidia ’s upcoming Blackwell GPUs.
Core Scientific’s quick success in this new world has surprised even the people who are driving it.
“Every once in a while I need to pinch myself, to see I’m actually not dreaming,” Brown said.
Core Scientific’s success does create a high bar for the stock to keep rising. The company is expected to lose money this year, largely because of a change in the value of stock warrants—an accounting shift that doesn’t reflect underlying earnings. Analysts see the company becoming profitable in 2025, when more of its data center deals start to hit the bottom line. They see EPS jumping tenfold by 2027. Shares trade at about 13 times those 2027 estimates.
The data center opportunity should only grow from here, as tech companies build more powerful AI systems. Of the 1,200 megawatts worth of gross power capacity Core Scientific has contracted, about 800 megawatts are going to data center computing deals and 400 megawatts toward Bitcoin mining.
Brown said the company has good relationships with its power suppliers and can potentially add more capacity without having to buy more real estate. It expects to be able to secure about 300 more megawatts worth of power at existing sites, perhaps by the end of the year.
It’s also in the hunt for new sites, including at “distressed” conventional data centers that have lost their tenants. Core Scientific has figured out how to quickly spiff up bare-bones data centers and turn them into high-tech sites with resources like liquid cooling equipment and much higher levels of electricity.
A single server rack in a standard data center might need 6 or 7 kilowatts of power. A high-performance data center can use as much as 130 kilowatts per rack; Core Scientific is working on increasing capacity to 400 kilowatts. The company likens the process of upgrading the warehouses to turning a ho-hum passenger vehicle into a Formula One racing car.
Core Scientific’s transformation from a broken-down jalopy to a hot rod has been a wild story. Its fate next year will depend on just how quickly the AI revolution unfolds.
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
