“A company whose name consists of the first name and surname of its founder will have a hard time moving on without them,” says Carlo Urbinati, the founder and president of Veneto-based lighting brand Foscarini. “It’s an almost impossible mission.” This was briefly forgotten when, in 2022, Urbinati heard that the company of Ingo Maurer, one of Germany’s most beloved lighting designers, was on the market. Given the chance to bid on the legacy of a trailblazer he had long looked up to, Urbinati couldn’t resist and brought it under the Foscarini banner.
Founded in Munich in 1966, Maurer’s namesake company is famed for its witty, irreverent pieces that helped to define the zeitgeist for decades. Its first key design was Bulb, an oversized light bulb that became associated with the pop art movement. In the 1970s, there was Uchiwa, a wall sconce made using a bamboo and rice paper fan; in the 1980s, the YaYaHo, a spindly tension-wire system; and in the 1990s, the Lucellino, which gave an incandescent bulb some feathered wings.
Merging cutting-edge technology with an affection for objets trouvés, Maurer produced inventions that have become industry standards, including the first lighting system using low-voltage wires. The designer worked until his death at the age of 87 in 2019, leaving behind 40 people based between an office in central Munich and a factory at the city’s edge.
“The heritage of this company is infinite,” says Urbinati. “It was based on an almost anarchic liberty to create things.” During his lifetime, Maurer took pride in eschewing all German rules of business management and running the workshop like an artist’s atelier. Everybody in the team worked directly under Maurer and his wife, Jenny Lau, with no hierarchy. There was no distribution network and no marketing department. Because everything was made in-house, it was never a problem that the company might only sell a small number of a product that had been developed from scratch.
“The goal here was never to make money,” says Axel Schmid, who became the company’s design director after Maurer’s death. “It was to keep making things.” This became an issue when the firm lost its driving force, prompting Maurer’s daughters to sell. Foscarini won the bid off the back of a promise to maintain Maurer’s legacy and keep the team in Munich. “We are investing a lot of time and money in reorganising the business, all while respecting what there already is,” says Urbinati.
Shortly after the purchase, Urbinati organised a workshop with the existing staff to understand Maurer’s design approach. One of the tasks was to construct something that was a characteristic Ingo Maurer piece. “The team ran down to the workshop and took whatever they could find,” recalls Schmid. After a few minutes, the designers had outfitted a large light bulb with 3M earmuffs, which became the Shhh! lamp, launched in April 2025 at Euroluce, the lighting section of Salone del Mobile, the world’s biggest furniture fair.
After visiting the workshop and factory, where boxes of old prototypes are still stashed, Urbinati asked the team to rummage through the archives and present some of what they found. “We didn’t even remember what was inside the boxes,” says Schmid. Maurer’s creative process involved travelling across the globe and bringing back objects and impressions, from erotically shaped Thai porcelains to toy racing cars. These often ended up boxed with the dozens of models that they inspired. Among the findings presented to Foscarini was a tiny LED light hung from a USB-C charger – an idea that Schmid had tinkered with years ago before forgetting it in a drawer. This became Strange Little Thing, also launched in 2025.
In the Ingo Maurer design department, housed in a former stable in a leafy courtyard in Munich’s Schwabing neighbourhood, Monocle finds Schmid, Sebastian Hepting, Julian Auch and David Engelhorn tinkering with a happy jumble of works in progress. Miniature prototypes and sources of inspiration, from fishing baits to confectionery ribbons, are hung from the lamps above the desks. Crowded in one corner are dozens of iterations of Bruce Springsteel, a new adjustable lamp. The team members work as they have always done, with each looking after one product from beginning to end. The difference, under Foscarini, is that they now judge the results collectively.
The influence of the new Italian owners has also gradually seen some organisational structures introduced to the company, including a stronger sales network and more respect for EU certifications, while trying to keep the magic that Maurer weaved. It’s too early to say whether Urbinati was wise to defy his own better judgement – the company remains far from lucrative – but the Venetians are playing the long game. “The team is perfectly capable of working on ideas à la Ingo,” says Urbinati. “Yes, Ingo is dead but his method and his teaching still have a lot to say.”
Running a design studio can be challenging and isolating. Inspiration for your work can be wide-ranging, spanning everything from art to everyday objects. For designer Joe Armitage, architecture is such a source. “I was stuck on the design of a lamp but a discussion with architect William Smalley helped me to finish it,” says Armitage. The longtime friends were discussing Smalley’s London Modernism, a mid-century courtyard house and refurbishment project in the southwest of the UK capital, which the architect believed might have some details that could help Armitage to complete his design. “There’s a Smalley-designed bench in the entryway,” says Armitage. “He asked me, ‘Why not add a curved element, similar to the bench, to the bottom of the table lamp? It’s practical and you can keep your keys or pen there.’”
If the marriage of practicality and aesthetics in Smalley’s advice wasn’t convincing enough, a visit to the project proved to Armitage that the curved element would complement the lamp’s design. This ultimately became the starting point for the design’s completion. The addition also reflects the ethos of Smalley’s work: projects that put people at their heart through meticulous attention to detail and rich material selections, exemplified by said bench at London Modernism. “We always like to provide a seat at the entrance to our houses for those coming and going to take off wet shoes and tie laces. In this project the bench is inside, next to the front door, with a gently curved seat along its considerable length, carved from sapele wood,” says Smalley. “The base of Joe’s desk lamp took a cue from this following a conversation that we had about how to soften the lighting and make it feel personal.”
The home and resulting lighting collection – called Modernist – use these curves to soften spaces. At London Modernism, for instance, a bending staircase leads to a primary-bedroom suite that Smalley added atop the original single storey mid-century home designed by Leslie Gooday. The staircase’s curvature eases the journey to bed. Armitage’s collection includes a desk lamp, two wall sconces and two overhead suspension lights. The lamp’s curved base invites human touch, while its distinct U-channel shades gently cast light across interior spaces.
Like Smalley’s work, Armitage’s collection features rich materiality: most fixtures feature walnut-and-brass components, while the shades are made from PET felt parchment developed in close collaboration with a Swiss engineering firm. To come full circle, the collection was installed – albeit temporarily – in London Modernism (pictured), bringing together the lighting and the architecture that inspired it.
Established in 1962, South Korea’s ILKW, with its incandescent-bulb-manufacturing facility in the city of Daegu, is a brand that walks the line between the efficiency of LED lighting and the beauty of incandescent light. This balancing act began in 1998, when second-generation owner Kim Hong-do inherited the family company and embarked on a singular mission to establish ILKW as a globally competitive brand, dedicated exclusively to this light source. However, the ascendant tide of LED technology and the imperative of global sustainability demanded a strategic re-evaluation, sending him on a quest to redefine the company’s heritage.
“I took a transformative journey, traversing the vibrant creative milieu of New York and the artistic lineage of Aix-en-Provence, yielding pivotal insights,” says Kim, when Monocle meets him at the brand’s Hoehyeon-dong showroom in Seoul. “I resolved to reposition ILKW as a purveyor of ‘artistic design’.”
The owner’s ambition was to evolve slowly. Initially, it resulted in a collaboration with South Korean designer Kwon Sun-man, who came on board as creative director of ILKW in 2014 and redesigned packaging for the firm, outlining the benefits of the glow of an incandescent light source compared to the LED lighting available at the time (which was particularly harsh and still in a relative infancy). Momentum shifted again in 2021 when Kim’s son, Si-yeon, joined the enterprise, ushering in a new epoch of marketing and operational vision.
Under his watch, the brand launched its Snowman series, which delivers exquisitely refined LED light. Additionally, ILKW’s decade-long annual presence at Seoul Living Design Fair has cemented its growth from a light-bulb manufacturer into a comprehensive lighting brand. The Snowman series will be on show at Euroluce in Milan this year. But Kim is keen to stress that the priority is still making beautiful light, whether incandescent or LED sourced. “We’re committed to integrating aesthetic excellence into both our manufacturing processes and product design.”
