9 Lighting Brands to Follow
A good lamp does more work than people give it credit for. It sets the mood of a room before anything else in it does, softens a corner that would otherwise go unused, gives a house somewhere to look warm at 6pm in January. The nine brands in this edit all understand that a light fitting is sculpture with a job to do. Some lean into colour and whimsy, others into restraint and material. Here's who to know.
Hum
Hum is a creative studio founded by two sisters, making handmade lighting in England - table lamps, decorated lampshades, bespoke pieces made to brief. Nothing mass-produced, nothing quite like the last one.
Palefire
Palefire is a small London design studio with a resolutely maximalist streak, run by founder Rowena Morgan Cox. The brand's debut lighting collection is hand-painted and made-to-order, its painterly surfaces and appetite for colour drawing on the Arts & Crafts movement and the Omega Workshops. Playful, but never at the expense of craft.
Late Afternoon
Late Afternoon isn't a brand so much as a collector - the London and Madrid-based team seek out artisans and family businesses making homeware the slow way, in wool, linen, clay and cotton. It's a rejection of both unattainable luxury and disposable homogeny, in favour of pieces built to become heirlooms rather than replaced next season.
Dinsdale
Dinsdale began as the sculptural practice of artist Hannah Dinsdale, and the lighting still reads that way - functional art objects rather than fittings. Kaleidoscopic colour and pattern meet references as varied as Victorian furniture, curly-cord telephones and 99 ice creams, landing somewhere both nostalgic and slightly uncanny.
Tinker & Tallulah
Founded in Nottinghamshire, Tinker & Tallulah makes handmade lampshades with a wink to Art Deco glamour - swishy fringes, bold fabrics, a refined sense of fun. Built for homes and hospitality spaces with no interest in blending in.
Helle Mardahl
Helle Mardahl Studio works in richly coloured glass, building what the brand calls a conceptual candy universe - influenced as much by Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as by any design movement. Glossy, indulgent, and unmistakably its own thing.
Amanita Labs
Amanita Labs designs around asymmetry and spontaneity of shape, producing pieces in limited batches that adapt to - and elevate - the space around them. Packaging is 100% recyclable, in keeping with a wider commitment to reducing impact without diluting individuality.
Bisby Bisques
Bisby Bisques is Helena Bisby's small-batch ceramics studio in South East London. Her designs play angular forms off against softer, more feminine details, and back again - pieces that complement a room by refusing to sit quietly in just one register.
La Belle Saison
La Belle Saison is a small British independent studio making thoughtfully and ethically produced pieces, each with an intended feeling behind it - a colour chosen for calm, a message meant to land somewhere warm. Joy, with the ethics done properly first.