Nexion’s Chennai Design Lab is an immersive environment where architects and designers experience premium sintered ceramic surfaces through light, texture, and spatial storytelling. The architectural doors, the Matrix wall, the Hearts installation: every corner is designed to make material selection intuitive, emotionally resonant, and creatively inspiring. This article walks you through the concept, the key spaces, and why the Chennai Design Lab represents a landmark moment in design culture in India.
A new philosophy of surface experience
Nexion’s new Chennai Design Lab is a landmark space that marks a new chapter in the brand’s commitment to the Indian architectural community.
The space is conceived as a curated journey where every lighting condition, every installation, and every spatial transition serves to deepen the designer’s understanding of how a surface truly behaves. How it reads at scale, it shifts with light or it feels alongside another finish.
Here every element carries intention and every zone invites exploration. The Chennai Design Lab is where material selection becomes a creative act through direct, lived experience with the surface itself.
The entrance: an Italian welcome
The visitor journey begins with a gesture of hospitality: a coffee-table style welcome counter inspired by Italian design culture, where relationships are built over conversation and espresso.
This opening sets the tone for everything that follows. The space is an invitation to explore, and engage in genuine design dialogue.
The entrance also houses the window showcase featuring Nexion’s concrete structures Riga and Ombre presented through three illuminated windows. Top-corner lighting creates a deliberate chiaroscuro effect: shadow and brightness working together to sculpt depth, texture and emotion into the surface.
As light shifts across the material, the surface transforms with it, revealing a fundamental truth that runs through every element of the Design Lab: a space is never static. It is a living ambiance, shaped by rhythm, harmony, and the constant interaction between light and design. The journey begins here, with feeling.
Light as a design tool: the Ombre architectural doors
Four full-height architectural door panels present Nexion’s award-winning Ombre Collection as a compositional element for contemporary spaces. Side lighting and subtle angular projections work together to reveal every dimension of the surface in dramatic, living relief.
The Ombre Collection translates the worn, time-erased beauty of natural surfaces into precision-engineered sintered ceramics. Raw earth and architectural rhythm are natural partners. Here, at full scale and under considered lighting, that partnership becomes unmistakably clear.
Reading rhythm: Riga and Lithic vertical strips
Two distinct display systems line the Design Lab, each dedicated to a different material language, yet united by the same curatorial intelligence.
Riga sintered surfaces impose measured geometric rhythm onto a surface, giving interiors their sense of composed order. Panels are arranged side by side, each lit from above at an angle that amplifies the relief and makes the distinction between each variant immediately readable. Architects can move along the line of panels and understand at a glance how variations within the same design collection create entirely different spatial moods.
Alongside, the Lithic vertical strips introduce Nexion’s stone-inspired language through panels arranged at a slight angle, with top-corner lighting that reveals subtle grain, tonal variation and quiet material authority. The most sophisticated stone-look surfaces distill nature.
The rotating pillars: Nexion’s pioneer position in surface texture
The rotating pillars are the Lab’s most kinetic and conceptually rich element. Each pillar carries multiple surface finishes, all within the same colour tone: concrete-inspired Riga patterns, dimensional Ombre structures, three-dimensional textures on marble designs.
Physically rotating the pillars, visitors experience first-hand how each texture responds to an identical light source in its own distinctive way. The interaction makes a precise and memorable statement: Nexion’s mastery of the sintering process enables a range of dimensional and tactile expression, from mirror-smooth to deeply sculpted, that is genuinely pioneering in the industry.
The Indo-Italian Hearts installations: culture as material
Among the Lab’s installations, the Indo-Italian Hearts carry the deepest symbolic weight. Positioned on either side of the central dividing panel, the two hearts are constructed from Terraelino Collection cubes arranged in a stepped, three-dimensional relief. Each cube is placed at a varying depth, some projecting forward, others recessed, creating movement, shadow, and architectural character.
The colours of the cubes are drawn from the chromatic vocabulary of the Indian and Italian flags. The installation expresses the foundational axis of Nexion’s identity: Italian design thinking and Indian craftsmanship meeting in material form, innovation and precision in dialogue with heritage, skill, and sensory expertise.
The Matrix wall and collaboration table: vision into decision
The Design Lab’s collaboration zone is its ultimate destination and its most productive space.
The Matrix Wall displays Nexion’s complete portfolio with removable sample pieces, divided between marble designs and stone, concrete, and wood-inspired surfaces. Architects can extract their shortlisted finishes directly from the wall and carry them to the central discussion table, where combinations are built, mood boards take shape, and design schemes are finalised with clarity and confidence.
Two distinct paths, one coherent journey
The Lab’s spatial organisation reflects a deliberate curatorial choice: marble designs and nature-inspired surfaces, stone, concrete, and wood, each occupy a distinct, dedicated area. Each path deserves to be read on its own terms, with full visual and emotional clarity.
From the dramatic depth of the marble gallery to the raw warmth of stone and concrete surfaces, the range of material expression in the Lab is considerable. The spatial separation ensures that range reads as richness, and every collection speaks with its full voice.
The Chennai Design Lab has already welcomed some of India’s most respected design voices. Their words capture what the space is designed to deliver better than any description could.
Ar. Shripal Munshi of Shripal and Venkat Architects described the experience as setting a new benchmark in the industry:
“This is what leadership in product design stands for. Almost an art gallery standard of experience center.“
Ar. Raghuveer Ramesh captured the essence of what the Lab is designed to evoke:
“Materials must do more than just perform. They must respond to culture and to people. Emotions shape how we experience space, and here is where the conversation becomes architecture.”
A new standard within the Nexion Design Lab network
Nexion’s Design Labs extend from Fiorano Modenese in Italy to Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Cochin, Surat and Pune, each one a dedicated space where architects and designers can engage with the brand’s material vision first-hand.
The Chennai Design Lab takes this commitment a step further. It is the most immersive and experientially refined space in the network, where light, storytelling, and spatial design converge to make every surface encounter genuinely transformative.
Plan your visit to the nearest Design Lab
Nexion’s Design Lab welcomes architects, interior designers, and design professionals by appointment. Bring your project brief, your instincts, and your questions.
