Tag Archives: lighting

Fiore Is a Wall Light, a Vase, and a Fragrance All at Once

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Most lighting does one thing: it illuminates. If it’s beautiful, that’s a bonus. If it fits the space, you’re winning. But every once in a while, a design comes along and quietly expands the definition of what an object is supposed to be, and Fiore by Jimmy Rojas is doing exactly that.

Fiore is a wall-mounted sconce, but to call it only that would be selling it short. At its core, it’s a multisensory piece that combines light, living flowers, and fragrance into a single wall-mounted object. The concept is elegantly simple: a built-in vase holds real blooms, and a signature scent designed to complement their natural aroma diffuses into the room. You’re not just looking at a beautiful light fixture; you’re experiencing it. You smell it. You watch the flowers change as the week goes on.

Designer: Jimmy Rojas

The design came out of Jimmy Rojas’ time at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and it’s been collecting recognition ever since. Fiore earned a Silver at the International Design Awards in the Conceptual Products category, was a People’s Choice honoree at the 2025 NYCxDESIGN Awards, and made its way to Salone Satellite in Milan, one of the most competitive stages for emerging designers in the world. These aren’t small accolades. They signal that the design community is paying attention, and for good reason.

What makes Fiore feel particularly relevant right now is the way it taps into something a lot of us are quietly craving: interiors that actually engage more than just our eyes. Biophilic design, the idea of bringing natural elements into our living spaces, has been a conversation in design circles for years. But Fiore takes that concept and makes it literal in the most delicate way possible. A real flower in your wall, radiating fragrance into the room. No screen, no app, no complicated setup. Just nature, light, and scent.

I’ll be honest, I have a slight bias here. I’ve always believed that the best design doesn’t announce itself loudly. It earns its place in a room by making life feel slightly better, slightly richer, in ways you notice over time rather than all at once. Fiore operates on that frequency. It’s the kind of object you come home to and slowly appreciate more as the days pass.

It’s also worth looking at how Fiore fits into the current interior design moment. Maximalism is back with force, from statement furniture to bold wallpapers to gallery walls stacked floor to ceiling. Within that landscape, Fiore manages to feel both bold and restrained. It’s wall-mounted, so it doesn’t compete for floor or shelf space. But it holds living flowers and diffuses scent, so it commands presence in a way that a standard sconce never could. Balancing those two qualities is genuinely difficult to pull off.

Rojas clearly understands that fragrance is one of the most underused tools in interior design. Candles and reed diffusers have long dominated the home fragrance space, and while they work well, they’re objects that sit on a surface and do their thing passively. Fiore integrates scent into the architecture of the room itself, into the wall, which feels like a genuinely new idea. The fact that the fragrance is designed to pair specifically with the real flowers in the vase adds another layer of intentionality that sets this apart from a concept piece that’s merely clever.

If Fiore moves into full production, there are real-world questions worth asking: how often do the flowers need replacing, what happens in winter when fresh blooms are harder to source, and whether the fragrance component can be made refillable and sustainable. Those aren’t dealbreakers, just the details that turn a great concept into a great product. But as a concept, Fiore is one of the more complete design ideas in recent memory. It knows what it wants to be, and it commits fully. Lighting has always been foundational to how a space feels. Fiore is simply asking whether it couldn’t also shape how a space smells, and how alive it feels. The answer, apparently, is yes.

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A Student Just Designed the Lantern Every Nomad Needs

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Most portable lights exist to solve a problem. They help you see when there’s no overhead fixture, charge your phone during a power outage, or keep your campsite from going completely dark. They’re useful, and that’s about where the conversation ends. Designer Benjamin Mtonya clearly thought that wasn’t enough.

His student project, Fluted, just earned a Student Notable honor at the 2026 Design Awards, and it deserves more attention than that modest title suggests. Because Fluted isn’t trying to be useful. It’s trying to be familiar. And that’s a meaningfully different ambition.

Designer: Benjamin Mtonya

The premise is straightforward, even if the execution is anything but. We move constantly now, between apartments, sublets, shared houses, short-term rentals, studio spaces we inhabit for six months before packing up again. Our stuff moves with us, but atmosphere typically doesn’t. You can’t carry the warm, golden light of your old apartment into a new, fluorescent-bright one. The mood of a space is tied to its architecture, its windows, its ceiling height, even the color of its walls. Your floor lamp will tag along for the ride, but it won’t feel like home until the room does.

Fluted is Mtonya’s answer to that gap. It’s a portable lantern, yes, but designed entirely in the language of furniture rather than electronics, which is exactly why it works so well as a concept. The materials are deliberate: maple for tactile warmth at points of contact, leather to suggest carry and continuity, polished steel for a quiet refinement, and fluted glass to soften the light into something that reads less like illumination and more like mood. An upward-facing light source diffuses through that glass and produces a warm ambient glow that recalls candlelight, the kind that makes a space feel inhabited rather than simply lit, and without the fire hazard or the melted wax cleanup.

The visual centerpiece of the design is clever in a way that rewards a second look. At first glance, you see a single continuous leather strap that appears to pierce straight through the entire object. It’s partly an illusion. A detachable leather strap at the top transitions visually into an internal leather spine suspended within a minimal metal frame below, but the eye reads it as one uninterrupted element. It gives the whole thing a structural coherence that most portable lights completely lack. It doesn’t look like something you grabbed from a shelf out of necessity. It looks considered. It looks like it belongs somewhere.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. We’ve accepted, almost without question, that portable objects are allowed to look utilitarian. Power banks look like bricks. Portable speakers look like, well, portable speakers. The category tends to signal its own temporariness through its aesthetic. Fluted pushes back on that assumption quietly, without making a fuss about it. It’s not loudly declaring that it’s beautiful; it’s simply refusing to look disposable.

Mtonya designed it specifically for what he calls the “domestic nomad”: individuals whose environments shift regularly but who value continuity of atmosphere within them. That framing is worth sitting with for a minute. It’s not about people who travel light as a romantic lifestyle philosophy. It’s about the very ordinary experience of being in-between spaces, or between phases of life, and still wanting the corner of your room to feel like yours. That’s an experience a lot of us share right now, more than we probably want to admit.

As student work goes, the philosophical clarity here is striking. A lot of design projects at this level are technically impressive but emotionally neutral. Fluted has a genuine point of view. It’s making an argument about what a portable object can mean, and it makes that argument through material choices and formal decisions rather than through a written manifesto. The object does the talking, and it’s articulate. Whether Fluted ever moves into production remains to be seen. But the conversation it starts about what we deserve from the objects we carry with us is already worth having.

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The Lamp That Turned a 100-Year-Old Rule Upside Down

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The lampshade has had one job since Edison’s era: surround the bulb, soften the glare, direct the light. It exists in service of something else, always subordinate, always secondary. Nobody really looks at a lampshade. They look at the light it produces. Raphael Klug decided that was a problem worth solving.

His Loop Lamp doesn’t hide the light source inside the shade. It moves the light entirely to the outside, leaving the shade hollow, open, and unapologetically empty. The shade stops being a vessel and becomes a volume. A form. An object in its own right. And when you see it in person, the effect is genuinely disorienting in the best possible way.

Designer: Raphael Klug (photography by Lisha Imani Hülser)

From the front, the Loop Lamp reads almost like a figure. The tapered column rises from the base, and the wide disc-like top floats above it with a thin ring of warm light glowing along the inner rim. The shade and the body connect in a way that feels less industrial and more sculptural, somewhere between a ceramic vessel and a modernist monument. You’d be forgiven for walking past it at an exhibition and thinking it was art before realizing it’s a lamp.

Seeing it installed alongside other furniture makes its presence even more apparent. The electric blue colorway, that deep, almost Klein-blue intensity, does a lot of the heavy lifting aesthetically. It photographs beautifully, which probably explains why it’s been circulating on design feeds. But there’s more going on here than a striking color palette.

What Klug has done is reframe the conceptual role of a familiar object. The shade, usually ignored, becomes the focal point. The light source, usually the star, steps offstage. It’s an inversion that sounds simple when you explain it but takes real design conviction to pull off without the result feeling like a gimmick. The Loop Lamp doesn’t feel like a gimmick. It feels considered, precise, and strangely inevitable once you understand the idea.

The material story adds another layer. The object was additively manufactured from quartz sand, produced in collaboration with Sandhelden, a company that specializes in 3D printing with natural sand-based materials. This isn’t just a process footnote because it shapes the object’s texture in a way that conventional molding couldn’t replicate. The surface has a slight granularity, almost matte and tactile, which contrasts beautifully with the ring of light. Under certain angles it absorbs shadow rather than reflecting it, giving the lamp a density that heavier materials don’t always achieve.

3D printing with sand also means that scale and material can shift in ways that traditional manufacturing makes difficult. Klug has already noted that the concept opens possibilities for other scales and materials, and I find that genuinely exciting to think about. A table version. A pendant version. A version in translucent composite that catches light entirely differently. The floor lamp is the proof of concept, and it’s a convincing one.

Design conversations lately tend to swing between two poles: objects that are purely functional and stripped of personality, and objects so decorative they forget to work. The Loop Lamp sits comfortably outside both camps. It functions exactly as a floor lamp should, casting a warm, ambient ring of light at the right height for a living space. But it also asks a genuine question about form, expectation, and what an object is allowed to be beyond its primary purpose.

That question is what makes it worth paying attention to. Designers interrogating the rules of familiar objects isn’t new, but doing it with this level of restraint and material intelligence is less common. Klug didn’t add more to the lampshade. He took away its responsibility and, in doing so, gave it an identity. That’s a harder thing to do than it looks. And the Loop Lamp makes it look effortless.

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Issey Miyake Just Made a Lamp That Wears Pleated Clothes

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When a fashion brand turns its most iconic textile technology into a lampshade, you pay attention. That’s the short version of what A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE and Swiss design studio atelier oï managed to do with the O Series, the latest chapter in their ongoing TYPE-XIII collaboration. Portable, pleated, and quietly radical, these lamps feel like proof that the best design ideas rarely stay confined to one category for long.

The project started in 2024, built on a deceptively simple question: what happens when clothing technology meets light? A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE is known for its A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) philosophy, which treats fabric as a continuous, considered whole rather than something to be cut and assembled. From that foundation came Steam Stretch, a process where pattern and structure are woven directly into a single piece of recycled polyester fabric. Heat is then applied to specific areas, causing them to contract and bloom into a dimensional, pleated form. No additional construction. No extra pieces. The texture is built into the material itself.

Designers: A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE x atelier oï

For the O Series, that same pleated textile becomes a lampshade. Atelier oï, the Swiss studio with a practice spanning architecture, interiors, and product design, contributed the oval wire frame that holds it all together. The shade is designed to be detached and swapped out, which means the lamp can shift its mood depending on what material, color, or texture you choose. It’s modular in the quietest, most intentional way: not a gimmick, but a reflection of how both studios think about longevity and use.

The second edition of the O Series was presented at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen this past June, marking A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE’s debut at the festival. The new colors were inspired by nature, which feels right for a material that transforms through something as elemental as heat. The exhibition at Gallery 2112 was set up so visitors could actually handle the lamps rather than just look at them from a careful distance. That decision says a lot about the confidence behind the design. When you make something this considered, you want people to touch it.

The collaboration is credited to designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae of A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE, working alongside atelier oï, with lighting expertise brought in from Ambientec. The TYPE-XIII project first debuted at Milan Design Week 2025, so Copenhagen represents a growing body of work rather than a one-off moment. That continuity matters. It suggests the two studios are genuinely exploring this territory rather than producing a collection for the press and moving on.

Somewhere in the details of the O Series is an idea that fashion has understood for decades: what you put in a room, like what you put on your body, can shift with context. The lampshade is interchangeable, almost seasonal. But unlike a cushion cover or a tablecloth, it arrives carrying real process. The structure comes from heat and fiber rather than scissors and glue, which gives it a kind of intellectual weight that most lighting objects simply don’t have.

It’s also worth saying that the lamps are just beautiful. The pleating catches light with the same kind of movement and depth you’d expect from an Issey Miyake garment, and the oval wire frame reads as restrained and precise without being cold. The portable format means they’re not anchored to a single room or a fixed power source, which opens up how and where you might actually use one.

Design collaborations between fashion and other disciplines can easily feel like branding exercises, two logos on one object with little else to show for it. The TYPE-XIII Atelier Oï project is not that. It’s a real conversation between two studios that understand materials deeply, and the O Series is the kind of outcome that makes you reassess what a lamp can actually be. Cloth and wire. Pleat and light. Sometimes the most interesting objects are the ones with the fewest elements.

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Rareraw Built a Shelf That Runs on Electricity (On Purpose)

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The modular shelving category is one of those rare corners of furniture design where almost nothing has changed in decades. You pick your posts, pick your shelves, snap them together, and that’s largely where the conversation ends. String’s wall-mounted system has been doing that since 1949. Vitsœ’s 606 has been doing it since 1960. USM Haller got a little more architectural about it in the sixties. The formula is familiar, and for a long time, familiar was fine. Then Rareraw showed up.

The Seoul-based industrial design studio just launched System000 in Dezeen Showroom, and the pitch is deceptively simple: a modular steel shelving system where the posts themselves are live infrastructure. Power runs through the uprights, enabling remote-controlled lighting to be built directly into the hardware that holds your books up. No separate lamp. No hunting for the nearest outlet. Just the structure itself doing double duty.

Designer: Rareraw

The mechanics of it come down to a self-developed, patented connector that Rareraw designed from scratch. This is the detail that matters most when you put it next to the classic names. String’s joinery is elegant and wall-dependent. USM Haller’s chrome ball connectors are satisfying to look at and genuinely clever, but the system’s logic is essentially fixed once you’ve committed to a layout. Rareraw’s approach is different in a specific way: it calls itself an “open system,” which means you can reconfigure the same components into a bookshelf, a sideboard, a room divider, or a full display wall without the whole thing becoming a logic puzzle. The connector isn’t just structural. It’s what makes the flexibility possible, and it’s the mechanism through which the lighting circuit travels.

Whether or not that patent claim holds up in every detail, the integration feels genuinely well-considered for the moment we’re in. The hybrid living room is no longer just a pandemic residue. People are working, reading, displaying, and hosting in the same eight hundred square feet, and the lighting layer is doing a lot of heavy lifting in making those transitions feel intentional. Ambient lighting in particular has become less of a lifestyle flourish and more of a basic expectation. Putting that control inside the furniture structure rather than layering lamps and cords around it afterward is a logical move that’s surprisingly rare in this category.

It also makes System000 feel less like a storage product and more like architecture you assemble. A tall configuration as a room divider, with the posts lit from within, reads as structural columns before it reads as furniture. That shift in register is genuinely interesting, and it’s not something the Vitsœ or the String can do regardless of how you accessorize them.

Rareraw is a South Korean studio with a presence at Maison&Objet, and System000 fits the profile of Korean industrial design that’s been gaining serious ground internationally. Precise, restrained, technically specific. The name itself, with its three zeros, suggests a starting point rather than a finished product, which either means there’s a roadmap of follow-on configurations and accessories, or it’s just very good naming instinct. Either way, it sticks.

The questions still left open are the practical ones that any serious buyer needs answered. Pricing isn’t listed on the Dezeen Showroom page, which tells you this is a conversation-required purchase rather than an add-to-cart one. Post heights, load ratings, and the specifics of how the lighting is powered are also details that Rareraw hasn’t published prominently yet. Those are not small considerations when you’re asking someone to build a room around a shelving system.

Still, System000 is asking a better question than most of this category has bothered to ask in a long time. The modular shelf has essentially been coasting on the logic of its midcentury inventors, and Rareraw is looking at the same brief and asking what happens when the post becomes a conduit, not just a post. The answer is something worth watching.

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The €499 Ceiling Panel That Shifts Like the Sky From Dawn to Dusk

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The way natural light moves through a home is something architects spend considerable effort thinking about and homeowners rarely control. A room that gets good morning light may feel completely flat by afternoon. A basement office might go weeks in dim, color-distorted artificial light that strains your eyes and makes every hour feel identical. The architecture of most homes simply wasn’t designed around the idea that the ceiling could do more than hold a light fixture.

The Philips Skylight is a ceiling panel that started as a professional product, used in offices, lobbies, and medical practices, and has since been adapted for the consumer market. Designed around Signify’s NatureConnect LED technology, it’s built to recreate not just the brightness of daylight but also its depth, color variation, and the way those qualities shift over the course of a day.

Designer: Philips (Signify)

The panel’s visual framing creates a depth effect that reads more like a window to the sky than a flat ceiling-mounted fixture. The light isn’t static: an Auto Day Rhythm feature automatically adjusts brightness and color temperature throughout the day following a fixed schedule. During the day, BioUp LEDs deliver blue-enriched light to support alertness and focus. As evening arrives, the spectrum shifts to warmer, more relaxed tones.

That kind of passive, scheduled behavior is one of the Skylight’s cleaner design decisions. There’s no app to configure, no smart home hub required, and no automation to build. The included remote handles manual control, and five preset lighting scenes cover the range from an energized home office session to something closer to winding down. The absence of smart home integration has drawn some criticism given the price, but for anyone who finds smart home setups a hobby in themselves, the simpler approach may actually be the selling point.

The range comes in four variants: a Philips Skylight Medium, Philips Skylight Large, Philips Skylight VitaUp Medium, and Philips Skylight VitaUp Large. The VitaUp versions include an integrated UV-B module designed to support the body’s natural vitamin D production indoors, with a safety feature that automatically cuts the UV-B output off after eight hours. The product carries a disclaimer that it’s not a medical device and doesn’t replace actual sunlight, which is probably the right framing for something that lives on a ceiling.

An IP44 rating across the entire range means the Skylight can also be installed in bathrooms and other humid spaces, which changes the calculation considerably. A bathroom that gets no natural light is exactly the kind of room where spending two hours on a winter morning begins to feel like something is actively wrong with the day before it’s even started. Placing a light that actually follows the rhythm of daylight in that space addresses a very specific, rarely solved problem.

European markets have the Skylight from June 2026, starting at €499.99, with US availability expected in September 2026. The technology backing it has already spent time in settings where lighting quality genuinely matters, which gives it a credibility that consumer-only smart bulbs have historically struggled to carry. How well the depth effect translates from professional installation to an ordinary home ceiling is something that hands-on testing will eventually settle.

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Fritz Hansen and Technics Found Their Color: Burgundy

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Some collaborations make perfect sense the moment you hear about them. Fritz Hansen and Technics pairing up feels like that kind of announcement, the sort that makes you stop scrolling and actually read the press release. A Danish design house with a lamp rooted in 1936 Bauhaus tradition, and a Japanese audio brand whose turntables have been part of serious listening rooms for decades. On paper, it sounds almost too considered. And yet, the result is exactly that: deeply considered.

The collaboration brings two limited-edition objects together under a shared identity: the Kaiser idell Luxus 6631-T lamp and the Technics SL-40CBT turntable, both finished in a matte deep burgundy that reads quietly elegant rather than bold. It is the kind of color that does not announce itself but still shifts the entire mood of a room the moment you place it in one. Fritz Hansen will produce 200 lamps, Technics will offer up to 300 turntables, and both launch in October 2026. Those numbers alone tell you this is not a product launch so much as an edition, something that is meant to be lived with rather than simply owned.

Designers: Fritz Hansen and Technics

The Kaiser idell 6631-T is worth talking about on its own. The lamp traces its origins back to 1936, a Bauhaus-era design reissued by Fritz Hansen, featuring a conical shade, an adjustable arm, and a brass base that develops a patina over time. It is one of those designs that feels neither vintage nor modern because it has simply always been correct. Pairing it with a contemporary turntable could have gone sideways quickly, forced nostalgia dressed up in burgundy, but the Technics SL-40CBT holds its own. It is a direct-drive turntable with Bluetooth capability, the kind of piece that respects the ritual of vinyl while being honest about the fact that convenience matters too.

What makes this collaboration genuinely interesting is not just the color match but the philosophical argument behind it. Dario Reicherl of Fritz Hansen put it well: “Sound and light both change how a space feels without touching its structure.” That sentence cuts right to the point. We talk a lot about interior design in terms of furniture and materials, but light and sound are arguably the two most powerful variables in how a room actually feels to be in. The fact that two heritage brands decided to frame a product launch around that idea rather than simply trading on each other’s prestige feels like a more honest creative decision.

The collaboration was previewed at 3 Days of Design 2026 in Copenhagen, where the two pieces were displayed on original Fritz Hansen Bauhaus-style tables pulled from the archive. That context mattered. Seeing them in a listening bar setting, as part of the Fritz Hansen Sound Club installation, gave the objects a sense of purpose rather than just aesthetic. They were not styled for a campaign. They were placed the way you would actually use them, together, in a room designed for paying attention.

Ryo Ogasawara from Technics offered a different angle on the same idea: “Music is an art of time.” He described how sound quietly imprints itself on our emotions, and how light shapes the space in which that happens. It is a poetic framing, but it is not empty. It reflects something real about the experience of listening to music at home, the way a good lamp and a record player together create a setting that invites you to slow down.

At £819 for the lamp and €999 for the turntable, this is not an impulse purchase. But then, it was never meant to be. These are objects for people who think carefully about the things they bring into their homes, who understand that a limited run of 200 or 300 units means something will eventually hold both sentimental and material value. The deep burgundy will age. The brass will develop character. The records will keep playing. And the room they exist in will be better for all of it.

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This Free 3D Lamp Has 300 LEDs and Looks Nothing Like a Printed Object

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Decorative lighting has become one of the more satisfying corners of the maker movement. Most off-the-shelf lamp designs don’t bring much that’s genuinely distinctive into a space, and the ones that do tend to cost far more than the task deserves. That’s pushed a growing number of people toward building their own, using 3D printing and open-source lighting firmware to create objects that simply wouldn’t exist any other way.

The Cyber Loop Lamp is the kind of result that tends to stop people mid-scroll. It takes the shape of a vertical wheel, somewhere between a car’s rim and a navigation pin laid flat, and wraps that form in a layered lighting system that creates an infinity-like depth effect. The files are available for free on MakerWorld, and building one is a genuinely demanding project.

Designer: LightCore3D

At approximately 25cm tall, the lamp has enough presence to anchor a desk corner without overwhelming it. The design uses colored filament for the outer shell and clear filament for a transparent inner diffuser layer. That separation between the light source and the outer shell produces the glowing, almost holographic depth that makes the lamp look so unlike anything that came off a 3D printer.

The lighting system draws from nearly 300 individually addressable RGB LEDs, packed into a 2m WS2812B strip running at 144 LEDs per meter. Three distinct zones handle the display: a central funnel, the outer perimeter ring, and roughly a dozen inner spokes. Each zone runs its own color and effect independently, giving the lamp that layered, animated quality that holds attention in a way static ambient lighting usually doesn’t.

Control comes from an ESP32 board running WLED firmware, which lets you map each LED zone to its own effects group and cycle through custom presets. WLED is open-source and widely supported, with a large built-in animation library and enough room to create your own sequences on top. The entire system draws from a 5V, 6A power supply, relatively modest for something delivering this amount of visual output.

Getting there takes real commitment. The model spans 12 print plates with an estimated print time of roughly 35 hours, and that’s before assembly begins. Soldering is required, and components like resistors and capacitors join the LED strip and controller in the electronics stack. The creator is upfront that the assembly process isn’t fully documented, so some steps will require problem-solving on the fly rather than following a defined guide.

That friction is part of what makes the result feel earned. A lamp that takes 35 hours to print and several more to assemble isn’t something you’d put together casually, which means it carries weight as an object in the room beyond what any store-bought light could. It sits at a desk or shelf and reads as something deliberately built for exactly the space it occupies.

The Cyber Loop Lamp lands in that unusual territory between a functional accent light and something closer to a display piece, the kind of object that draws questions from people in a room before they figure out what it even is. The model is free on MakerWorld, and the full bill of materials is available directly from the project page for anyone ready to commit to the build.

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6 Murano Glass Lamps That Glow Without a Single Cord

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If you’ve ever wished your lamp could double as a sculpture, or that a piece of Venetian craft could actually travel with you from room to room rather than stay anchored to the nearest outlet, Flowers in Wonderland might just ruin every other lamp you’ve ever owned. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way really good things do.

Designed by Alessandra Baldereschi for Multiforme, the collection is made up of six table lamps, each shaped like an unopened flower bud and hand-blown in artistic Murano glass. They come in soft pastel tones, they’re touch-activated, and they glow. Quietly, beautifully, and completely without a cord.

Designer: Alessandra Baldereschi

That last part matters more than it sounds. Portable lighting has been around for a while, but most of it still skews practical or industrial. A camping lantern. A rechargeable desk light you forget to charge. The cordless lamp category hasn’t exactly been known for elegance, or for the kind of visual impact that makes you actually want to own one. Baldereschi’s Flowers in Wonderland steps into that gap with a very different idea of what a portable lamp can look and feel like. These are objects you place somewhere because they’re beautiful, and the light just happens to be part of that.

The Murano glass angle is worth sitting with. Venice’s glassblowing tradition goes back to the 13th century, when the city relocated its glassmakers to the island of Murano to reduce the risk of fire in its densely packed streets. The craft has stayed there ever since, producing work that ranges from decorative to ceremonial to, yes, commercially mass-produced. What Multiforme does differently is keep the handmade core alive while pushing the design language somewhere genuinely contemporary. Each piece in the collection is hand-blown, which means no two are exactly alike, and the light that filters through the glass carries a warmth and depth that manufactured materials simply can’t replicate.

Baldereschi herself is a Milanese designer with a sensibility that’s harder to pin down than most. She trained at Domus Academy in Milan, one of the more rigorous design schools in Europe, and then spent time in Japan developing ceramic tableware with companies in the Gifu district. That combination of Italian craft tradition and Japanese restraint shows up quietly in her work. She brings a precision to how she handles materials, but also a kind of playfulness that keeps things from ever feeling stiff. Her portfolio spans glassware, décor, and lighting, and she’s shown at the Triennale di Milano, the Seoul Design Festival, and the Moss Gallery in New York. She’s not a newcomer with a single viral moment. She’s a designer who’s been building a coherent body of work for decades.

Flowers in Wonderland premiered at Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, which is already a statement. It then went on to win the Curiouz Award at Venice Design Week 2025, a recognition dedicated to the most innovative projects in contemporary design. The win acknowledged the collection’s ability to combine technology and craftsmanship in a way that doesn’t feel like a compromise. Usually, when a product leans hard into one, it sacrifices the other. Here, the battery-powered portability and the centuries-old glassblowing technique feel like they belong together.

The collection comes in six flower shapes, each capturing a bud that’s almost open. Not fully bloomed, not completely closed. That specific in-between moment is where Baldereschi seems most interested, and it translates beautifully into objects that feel like they’re holding their breath. You want to place them on a windowsill, a dining table, or a nightstand, and then just watch the light shift as the day changes around them.

Lighting design rarely gets the cultural attention it deserves. We spend a lot of time talking about furniture and architecture, and considerably less thinking about how the quality of light in a room actually shapes the way we experience it. A lamp like this makes that conversation unavoidable. You can’t ignore it. You don’t really want to.

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From Foldable Pilates to Shoe Robots: InnoX GCS 2026’s Best Startups

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The consumer tech market has a crowding problem, mostly driven by products that try to do too much for too many people. The most interesting hardware lately has been doing the opposite, building around one specific inconvenience that hasn’t been properly addressed yet. Shenzhen has always had a knack for this, and InnoX Academy has been quietly developing the next generation of builders who make those products happen.

Founded in 2021 by Professor Li Zexiang of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen InnoX Academy is a structured ecosystem that develops engineers and entrepreneurs into product builders. At the Global Connect Show 2026, it gave the world a look at its latest batch of startups, from home fitness and pet care to ambient design objects, each taking a more considered approach to a specific problem.

Pilates reformers have always been the kind of equipment you’d only find in a dedicated studio, too large and bulky for most apartments to accommodate. Pavo Fitness, started by a team of architects, industrial designers, and professional Pilates instructors, saw that as a solvable problem. The Pavo Reformer is their answer: a compact, foldable machine designed to bring studio-quality resistance training into a regular home.

Designer: PAVO

Once a session is done, it packs away without being disassembled or moved to a corner, so it doesn’t have to become a permanent fixture in your living space. The onboard smart system keeps tabs on workouts, which matters more in a home setting where there’s no instructor watching your form. It adds a layer of accountability that a conventional reformer simply can’t offer.

Multi-pet households have a feeding dynamic that most smart feeders don’t actually address. A timed dispenser works for one pet, but when multiple cats have different dietary needs, scheduling meals is only part of the problem; the harder challenge is making sure each cat only gets its own food. That’s what PETPA was built to solve, by a team that previously worked on hardware at DJI, Narwal, and RoboMaster.

Designer: PETPA

The PETPA Multi-pet Feeder uses individual pet recognition to identify each cat and control access to their food, particularly useful in homes where one cat needs to lose weight or follow a prescription diet while the others don’t. It launched at CES 2025 and earned a CES Innovation Award in the Pet Tech and Animal Welfare category, recognizing a product solving a problem most smart feeders still overlook.

Sneaker care has evolved into its own dedicated ritual for collectors and sports enthusiasts who’d rather not take chances with a stiff brush and soapy water. The typical cleaning routine still carries the risk of fading colors, weakening materials, or warping the structure of more delicate footwear. Brolan’s ClearX is a compact home machine that moves through cleaning, low-temperature drying, and sterilization all in one automated cycle.

Designer: Brolan

Founded in 2025 by a team drawing from Nanyang Technological University, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Tsinghua University, Brolan designed ClearX specifically to clean without the harshness of manual scrubbing. The idea is to get footwear thoroughly clean without putting materials at risk, which matters most for anyone who owns suede, knit, or premium leather shoes that even a careful hand-wash can easily ruin.

Not everything in the InnoX lineup is about automation or performance tracking. REAZENABLE takes a different direction with the REAZE Sandstone Series, a collection that sits somewhere between smart lighting and decorative object, aimed at people who’d rather their home feel calmer than more connected. The brand’s philosophy, technology empowering nature and light reshaping emotion, gives a clear sense of where its priorities are.

Designer: REANZENABLE

The collection includes the Halo light and three aroma vessels, all made from sand-based materials and shaped with ribbed surfaces that recall an uneven lunar landscape. The technical structure is deliberately concealed within those soft architectural forms, so nothing on the shelf reads as a gadget. Atmospheric light, mineral textures, and scent work together into something that feels more like a ritual object than a piece of hardware.

Several other InnoX startups addressed more personal routines. Rootique brought the DUO, a scalp atomizing applicator using patented DuoTrace and IntelliMist technology for precise serum delivery in about 15 seconds, already validated through an Indiegogo campaign that found backers across 52 countries. OCJOY presented the OCJOY Air, a home micro-air oral cleaning system that brings a water-air-powder cleaning method from dental offices to your own countertop.

Direct Drive Tech D1

The lineup stretched into less expected territory, too. Blucalm’s StrikeDeck delivers AI-assisted game audio through a desktop controller, while ORULINK’s Watcher-Robot is an open-source desktop AI companion built for everyday interaction. CHEERLUCK brought a sausage vending robot for campuses and public spaces, and both Y-H2O and ANAVI presented electric watercraft, a hydrofoiling vessel, and a smart personal watercraft, each designed to cut the noise and emissions of traditional marine engines.

EcoFlow

Narwal

What gives the InnoX lineup credibility beyond the show floor is the academy’s broader history. Brands like Narwal, SwitchBot, DJI, EcoFlow, AgileX, and LiberLive are all part of InnoX’s wider ecosystem, a track record that makes it worth paying attention when the academy’s latest batch of incubated products steps out in front of an international audience for the first time.

LiberLive

DJI

The post From Foldable Pilates to Shoe Robots: InnoX GCS 2026’s Best Startups first appeared on Yanko Design.