Reinventing the bed
Grier Govorko once created shows for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Now he’s designing a super bed.
Friday, September 03 2010 || Innovation || BY Melanie Cooper
Growing up he had ambitions of being a race car driver, but instead Kiwi-born Grier Govorko began working as an audio technician and wound up in stage design for the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys. Now Govorko is back in New Zealand — at least for a spell — reinventing himself as the product designer behind a just-released speaker range and a yet-to-be-made high-end technology-laden bed that has caught the attention of the Yotel hotel chain.
What was the path from small-town New Zealand to international rock gigs?
My first work was as an audio engineer — training was by doing I guess. I moved to London when I was 19 and was very soon touring the world. I think my first gig was in 1989 as an audio technician for the Pogues on a European tour. We were in Hamburg the day the Berlin Wall came down, so it was a pretty exciting time. Everything else I’ve done has been the same in that it has been self-taught, driven by dogged determination and wanting to get to the bottom of whatever it may be.
What was your last gig?
My last concert was the Chili Peppers’ European Stadium Arcadium Tour in 2006. It was a massive show but because it was Europe in the summer and outdoors, and it doesn’t get dark till much later, like 9.45pm or 10pm, it was never going to look like the typical rock show. So I created a show where you didn’t know what it was in the daylight — it just didn’t look like anything you’d seen, there was no roof, no walls, virtually no lights, virtually nothing, but actually it was an enormous video show that until the lights went off, you didn’t know it was there. And then of course as it goes dark there is this massive transformation and people go fuckin’ mad and it’s really fun.
Nearly three years ago you came up with some product ideas. Where did the idea for the Somnus Neu bed come from?
A strange place. I was living in Thailand — I have been going there for 20-odd years and I own a place there — and where I live you always sleep under mosquito nets. After years and years of living under those mosquito nets I was thinking why doesn’t somebody design a mosquito net with a hollow frame that goes over the bed that can have all the internal fans and lighting built into it because I am sick to death of getting up from this mosquito net, getting attacked by mosquitoes, getting back in through the nets and then spending the next four hours trying to fight them in the dark. The other part of it was I had spent most of my time working on the road and living out of hotel rooms and I found that I did all my work in bed, or at least on the bed, anyway.
So then the idea became to make it a fully functional space that incorporated most of the things that you would typically use in bed — computers, lights, music, video, television — surrounded by the cocoon-like curtain that closes around it.
Even though it’s still in the production phase you said there are strong signs of demand for the bed.
Yotel [the English hotel chain started by Simon Woodruffe of Dragons’ Den fame] got on to it really early and we first spoke about nine months ago. Yotel is based on the concept of a pod hotel — small rooms, well designed — but they realise there’s a demand from people with more money that want to stay in Yotels but don’t want to stay in pods, so they are building new ones in New York and in London with suites and they’ve been talking about putting Somnus Neu in their suites. The building is supposed to go ahead in mid-2011 and they would want 20 units.
Off the website I have had a few hundred sales enquiries, including a few from Switzerland where it was covered in their national paper. Random. It has been covered by various media around the world, including Fast Company, which was a bit of a coup.
What’s been the biggest challenge so far?
Definitely one of the hardest things is to go off and find the right people to do the things you need them to do. At the moment I am working on the prototype with a local company called Opco, which manufactures Design Mobel beds.
At the same time you have been developing Somnus Neu you’ve also created the Q speakers range, which just sold its first shipment. How did that happen?
Basically I am a manic workaholic. I came up with the concept about the same time as the Somnus Neu and I have developed them from scratch — I did the design, worked on the technology part of it, sourced the D-class amp and so on. I have just divided my time sort of by necessary priority on any given day. We picked up 12 retailers in Australia and a bunch of business in hotel rooms, which is part of the strategy — these days they all need music in the rooms and the speakers are a beautiful item.
It is a fairly varied career path so far — audio engineer to stage designer to product designer. How do those roles feed into each other?
I don’t think many people really understand what it is to design a show. A show is partially the technology — combining video, software, audio, lights, maybe lasers, maybe hydraulics — and then it is everything else, it is setting the scene, controlling the mood. I used to do experiments with large numbers of people; for one thing if you simulate a heartbeat through an audio system with a bunch of people — 8000, 10,000, 20,000 whatever it might be — people’s heartbeats start to fall in line with the introduction of this other beat. So there are all sorts of interesting, manipulative things you can do with crowds through audio or light or video or whatever. Good product design is the same thing; it can change the way people feel.
Is the permanence of product design somehow more gratifying than the fleeting presence of a stage show after months of work?
I actually think [stage design] is a really nice way to work, because there is an obvious, tangible end of story. There’s the story, see you later. Probably about eight to 10 months go into each one of those show designs and there are a lot of people involved. I love the process of designing a show but I also like that there is a moment where it all comes to a head. I don’t suspect that there’s anything in terms of design in the world that comes close to the immediate impact and the excitement of designing large-scale live shows.
Where are you calling ‘home’ these days?
I don’t know that I am ever anywhere that permanently. I always say that LA is my home because I have lived there most of my life, but I haven’t lived there in three years so I don’t know if that is true anymore either. Ideally I would live on my little island in Thailand but it’s not that practical — you can’t do much there but watch monkeys and go swimming, which I don’t mind but it doesn’t help with turning the design into a reality.
Have you got a pre-order in for a Somnus Neu for your house in Thailand?
Ironically, no. The nets are still driving me crazy. I’m not sure if I should be putting one into that environment — it’s a pretty remote piece of land.
