Italian luminary shows Irish the light

Trade Names: Lighting is an integral part of building design - but it wasn't always like that here. Rose Doyle finds out about a company which brought Italian lighting ideas to Ireland

The Fairfin Lighting story is a neat chronicle of design and lighting changes in Ireland, a tale of how a new generation is merging its know-how with trends in business and style. Fairfin Lighting has been there, worn the changing times T-shirt during the 20-odd years of the speediest transformation and economic growth the country has ever seen.

It started with Franco Finiguerra, with dollops of old fashioned grit and determination and a unique love story. Franco Finiguerra's son James, who is running the 2004 Fairfin business, tells his father's, and the Fairfin, story. The two are inextricable.

"My father comes from Sondrio, which is north of Lake Como," says James, "a very alpine-like place about two-and-a-half hours from Milan centre. He's 75 now so he was born between the wars and was a young teenager when the second World War came along. I grew up hearing war stories of bombs and horrors."

There weren't too many fancy lighting systems around when Franco Finiguerra left Sondrio to go to university in Milan and, while he studied, worked his way up the ladder with American engineering company Worthington.

"He went from the mailroom to running the show," his son says, "and became managing director."

He also harboured a keen interest in interior design - and a desire to learn English. Franco Finiguerra came to Ireland in pursuit of the latter when he was about 45 years of age.

And he met Brenda. The fact of her being 15 years his junior wasn't an impediment - "he was the older foreign gentleman" their son says now, grinning. They fell in love, married and headed back to Milan to live for 12 years.

Franco and Brenda Finiguerra's sons James and Frederick were seven and four respectively when the family returned to Ireland.

Franco had every intention of retiring but, as his son points out, "he was in his late fifties, had been working since he was 16 and couldn't sit down".

So indulging his lifelong interest in interior design, James Finiguerra set up and opened Fairfin Interiors on the first floor balcony of the trend-setting 1980s Powerscourt Townhouse Centre.

"In Milan he and my mother would spend days walking around stores, just looking at furniture and interiors. He decided to do lights and furnishing and lighting, all of it Italian designed," says James. "Ycami, Rimadesio, people like that, very modern in style, especially for early 1980s Ireland. There was no money around, people were still leaving the country for work then, and Irish attitudes to interior design were still very traditional so it was hard to sell modern furniture.

"It was a brave thing to do, especially with rents what they were in Powerscourt. He was before Foko and Habitat and all of that."

The early Fairfin found itself with a fairly exclusive clientele, even when it moved to the Powerscourt centre's ground floor to catch passing custom.

"There was a 13-year period when the company ticked over," James says. "All through the 1980s I spent my summers working there. I remember a wonderful, eight-seater black African granite table which people ignored because they wanted traditional dark mahogany instead.

"Architects like Burke Kennedy Doyle and O'Mahony Pike knew we were there, and some interior designers were aware of us. Then people coming out of design schools began to come in, you'd see them sketching some of the pieces - that was before digital. You could see, slowly, how a growing number of people were looking at broader European design, how the old way of doing things was slowly going.

"Then the Celtic Tiger really kicked in and there was more money around. My generation was opened up by travel and Ireland began taking a bigger view of the fashion and design world.

"Irish designers began bringing in new fashion and design. We furnished the Nissan headquarters on the Long Mile Road - and became aware of the possibilities in furnishing offices." Became aware too of the growing design awareness of lighting.

"Up until fairly recently," James Finiguerra says, "architects weren't so clued in to lighting as an integral part of design. Millions would be spent on a building and very little of it on lighting. It used be basically cheap and nasty, now it's an intrinsic part of the initial design for a building.

"EU rulings on lighting came into play too, plus a precision and science which hadn't been much thought about before. The time came when we realised we were spreading ourselves too thinly, realised the future lay in commercial lighting and focused on that.

"I came on board full-time in 1998. My parents fully retired two years ago and I'm the company now. They've stopped holding my hand!"

The company left the Powerscourt centre in 1997 when, as James puts it, "we realised we didn't need the passing trade anymore". Fairfin's biggest contract today is with O'Brien Sandwich Bars.

"We supply them worldwide," James says, "here in Ireland where they've 130 outlets, in the UK where they've more than 50, in Singapore, Malaysia, Chicago, Saudi Arabia and Australia."

In a nice reversal of historical trends, Fairfin Lighting supplies O'Brien Sandwich Bars in all of those places with lighting directly from Ireland.

They're also the exclusive agent for a number of Italian lighting companies - notably Castaldi and Tronconi, market leaders in mainland Europe and now well known in this country too. James Finiguerra talks enthusiastically about Dunnes Stores home departments - about the lighting his company has installed in the Cornelscourt and Belfast stores, about how lighting has found a serious place in the world of work spaces.

"Architectural libraries are full of lighting books now. Lighting adds to the experience of any venue. Cascaldi do architectural pieces which add to any design. Last year's big trend was the wave-like lighting you see along by Spencer Dock and along the seafront in Dún Laoghaire.

"This year, LED is the big thing, tiny lights which are low on energy and have good output - it's about smaller fittings and cleaner designs, though there's still a big interest in the wave thing."

James Finiguerra says the company has changed from simply being a lighting provider to "finding lighting solutions. We can source what an architect wants or needs for his/her design, or what the company wants. I stay away from domestic lighting, I prefer the broad strokes of the wider market.

"There's just me involved, plus an accounts staff of two people. Ireland's been going through a lighting revolution in the last six years or so."

So has Fairfin Lighting, finally catching up with itself and the designer pieces Franco Finiguerra imported for a less than enthusiastic market in the early 1980s.