Peter Staples

At Blue Green Works, creative director Peter B. Staples creates lighting fixtures inspired by film, architecture, and New York City.

Designer Peter B. Staples brings a cinematographer’s eye to his designs for Blue Green Works, the studio he founded last year with longtime collaborators James McAvey and Dan Persechini, who handle the business side of things.

Staples studied film in college, when he considered the field the nexus of his curiosities about architecture, fashion, and narrative, but eventually found his way to design, where his multifaceted interests have informed his work.

Take the studio’s inaugural Palm lighting collection, which was inspired by the “brutal beach modernism” and storied hedonism of Fire Island Pines, the gay vacation destination. “The luminaires were conceived around sex and voyeurism,” Staples says. “They change as you move through them and play with different vantage points or transparencies.”

The studio is based in New York, and the city is providing more inspiration for its next act. “Here, people live out their dreams on the streets and in the restaurants, inside stores and bars,” Staples says. “I think it’s all kind of like a movie.”