10 Lighting Designers Shaping Interiors in 2026

Lighting is the most underestimated element in interior design. Furniture can be moved, surfaces can be repainted, but the quality of light in a room determines how everything else is perceived — and how you feel within it. The best lighting designers understand this not as a technical problem but as a philosophical one: how do you shape light so that it reveals a space rather than merely illuminating it?

The following studios represent, in our view, the most interesting thinking in lighting design today — spanning the architectural, the sculptural, and the quietly functional.

1. Apparatus Studio (New York)

Founded by Gabriel Hendifar, Apparatus has become the defining voice of a particular strain of American luxury — simultaneously indebted to mid-century modernism and entirely of the present. Their pendants and sconces treat light as a material in its own right, using hand-blown glass, blackened brass and oxidised bronze to create objects whose presence extends well beyond their illuminated function.

2. Atelier Areti (Athens/Zurich)

The work of sisters Giopato & Coombes brought international attention to Athens as a design city. Atelier Areti operates in a similarly rigorous register: clean geometric forms, metal finished to exacting standards, and a commitment to the idea that a light fitting should remain beautiful when turned off.

3. Studio Truly Truly (Berlin)

Kate and Joel Booy's Berlin studio has built a reputation for lighting that is emphatically tactile — forms that invite touching, surfaces that reward close inspection. Their approach draws on Scandinavian functionalism while incorporating a warmth and wit that distinguishes their work from Nordic austerity.

4. Contain (Lisbon)

Emerging from Portugal's rich tradition of craft manufacturing, Contain produces lighting in cork, marble and hand-rolled paper that locates contemporary design within a deep material history. The results are objects of unusual quietness — present without insistence.

5. Allied Maker (New York)

Ryota Nishi's studio produces lighting in which the structural logic is always visible. Joints, connections and material transitions are made explicit rather than concealed — an approach that gives Allied Maker pieces an intellectual rigour alongside their considerable beauty.

6. Articolo (Melbourne)

One of the most significant voices to have emerged from Australia, Articolo works almost exclusively in hand-blown glass made in their own Melbourne studio. The result is lighting of extraordinary chromatic depth, in which the blown forms catch and hold light in ways that mass-produced glass simply cannot replicate.

7. Frama (Copenhagen)

Frama's lighting sits within a broader aesthetic project — a complete vision of how a considered interior should feel. Their fixtures are modest in the best sense: they do not compete with the spaces they inhabit but illuminate them with quiet intelligence.

8. Volker Haug (Melbourne)

Haug's work is characterised by a precise industrial quality that is genuinely difficult to achieve — the sense of something engineered to exact tolerances while remaining unmistakably designed. His pendants and floor lamps reward the kind of extended looking that reveals a new detail each time.

9. Dimore Studio (Milan)

For those who find minimalism cold, Dimore Studio offers an alternative: layered, atmospheric, richly historical while remaining entirely contemporary. Their lighting is always part of a larger environmental proposition, conceived for rooms that feel inhabited rather than staged.

10. Studio David Thulstrup (Copenhagen)

The Danish designer's interiors have become one of the most-referenced aesthetics of the decade, and his lighting designs carry the same hallmarks: restrained but not ascetic, precise but not mechanical, and made with an attention to material quality that rewards long ownership.

Magna Mercatus curates lighting from studios whose work represents a meaningful investment in craft and design. We are available for guidance on specifying lighting for residential and hospitality projects.