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Home / Hawkes Bay Today / Lifestyle

Watch NZH Local Focus: David Trubridge lights the way in Rotorua

Kaysha Brownlie
NZ Herald·
19 Dec, 2016 10:51 PM2 mins to read

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By day it's Rotorua's newest eco-attraction.

And by night, with the addition of David Trubridge lights, the Redwoods Treewalk is a unique nocturnal tourism experience too.

Product designer for David Trubridge Marion Courtille says: "The forest itself is so beautiful and to be able to add a bit of magic
into it is really exciting for us."

The Night Lights experience opens just before Christmas. It features 30 of the Hawke's Bay artist's lights, with Tourism New Zealand partially funding the 350 thousand dollar project.

The lights hang in clusters from the 115-year-old trees and light over half a kilometre of suspended bridges.

The inspiration for the lights came from native birds which live in the Redwoods forest.

The biggest light is almost 3 metres long and the heaviest weighs 120kg.

It's a unique marriage of two different business entities - an area relatively unexplored in New Zealand.

Redwoods Treewalk Director Bruce Thomasen says: "The natural environment that we have here in the Redwoods with the sustainability and the natural ethos that David brings to that story just makes it work and you just know that it's a great New Zealand story."

David Trubridge says it's a "two-way thing".

"It actually sends a different message to New Zealand to tourists coming to this country. We are not just about clean green New Zealand and hiking and rugby but we're actually a sophisticated design-led economy as well."

This outdoor venture is a first for the designer - only made possible by the discovery of a top secret material.

"This is kind of key to the project really, we can't normally do wood outdoors it rots too quickly, it gets mouldy it looks very yucky very quickly, this material was ideal for it. The combination of this material arriving and this project at the same time was brilliant for us," Mr Trubridge says.

So brilliant - David Trubridge is now adding outdoor lighting to the collection of shades he sells.

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