ambience Celebrates 35 Years Of Being A Mostly-More-Successful-Than-Not-Lighting Company

Celebrating 35 Years Of Being A Mostly-More-Successful-Than-Not-Lighting Company

1987 was a big year for launches. The first episode of The Simpsons aired, McDonald’s launched a pizza and an ex-Kempthorne lighting employee shrugged his shoulders and said “this’ll do” to open doors at his first location at a once-dicey Abbotsford.

Indeed, our beginnings were humble, to say the least (we didn’t physically open the doors to ambience until around ’88 as we couldn’t afford real doors – weeyyyyyy haven’t heard that one before!).

ambience was built on a foundation of technical knowledge, with our principal helping to pioneer lighting design research & testing in Australia.

Here he is, doing some light testing circa ’75. At the time this was the largest swinging arm photometer (and the widest flares) in the southern hemisphere.

SJ + Kieron in front of our old logo designed by Aus design legend Alex Stitt (and Kieron's dad)

Since then, ambience has had everything from a wedding in the warehouse to team members getting tattoos from lost bets.

Oh, we’ve also managed to sneak in one or two rather nice lighting projects for Australia and the world’s leading brands and designers. But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. For example, there was that time when we found some type of reptile in a box we opened (still on the loose to this day).

Rach and SJ wInning Darc Lighting Design Award in London

Some of our accolades include winners at the Darc Awards, Good Design and London Lighting Design. We’ve also been published in a number of magazines and even a couple of books. Oh and also managed to make the world’s first deep-fried light.

So, today we’d like to yell from our rooftop in big bad Bundoora a massive muchas gracias to all the ace people that have made it all possible – ambience (and The Simpsons) we’ve outlived and blasted that McDonald’s pizza right out the oven. Or microwave. Or however they made it.