Designers
The people who shape every fixture
A Small Studio · Trained Across Disciplines · Working Together
A small studio with broad training
The Liora design studio is intentionally small. Our work brings together people trained in industrial design, architecture, materials science, and traditional craft — and the relationships among us are close enough that everyone touches almost every fixture in some way. Senior and junior. Veteran and newer voice. The result is lighting that gets argued over, refined, and resolved before it ever leaves a sketchpad.
This page isn't about individual personalities. It's about how the studio thinks, the disciplines we draw from, and the principles that show up in every piece we put our name to.
Five things we believe
Every studio has principles, written or otherwise. These are ours, written down. We refer to them when arguments arise — and they do.
Form should serve light
A lighting fixture is a tool first, an object second. Before we evaluate how a piece looks, we evaluate how light moves through it, falls from it, and shapes the room around it. A beautiful object that lights badly is a sculpture, not a fixture.
Materials should age
We design for the patina, not against it. Brass that warms with handling. Glass that fingerprints. Ceramic that picks up the marks of being used. A fixture should look more itself in ten years, not less.
Quiet beats loud
Statement pieces have their place. But we've found the fixtures most clients love after a year are the quiet ones — the pieces that do their job without insisting on attention. Our default voice is calm.
Detail at every distance
A good fixture works from across the room and from six inches away. We design shape for the long view, surface for the close one. If a piece falls apart when you stand next to it, we haven't finished it yet.
Make less, mean it more
We release fewer pieces than most studios our size. Each one represents months of refinement and the rejection of dozens of variants we couldn't make ourselves love. We'd rather make twelve pieces we'll stand behind in twenty years than fifty we'll quietly retire next season.
Who does what
Roughly speaking, our studio organizes around four disciplines. Most days, work crosses freely between them — but each role brings a different lens to a piece.
The form-givers
Working from the brief and from observation, this part of the studio shapes the initial geometry of a fixture — its silhouette, its scale, the proportional logic. Most of our concept-side designers come from industrial design or product backgrounds, with deep training in the visual languages our work draws from.
A piece typically goes through forty to sixty sketches at this stage — most of them quietly discarded.
The makers' translators
A sketch becomes a fixture only once it's been engineered. This part of the studio works directly with our workshops — sourcing the right brass alloys, specifying the right glass thicknesses, calculating weight tolerances and electrical loads. Most have backgrounds in mechanical engineering or materials science, and many are trained craftspeople in their own right.
They are the people who, more than once, have politely told concept that something cannot be done — and proposed how it can.
The light-readers
A fixture has to do its job. This part of the studio is responsible for how every fixture actually performs as a source of light — beam spread, color temperature, glare control, dimming behavior, and fit-to-purpose for typical room sizes. They run mockup rooms, photometric tests, and side-by-side comparisons against existing benchmarks.
Their training comes from architectural lighting design, with crossover into theater, photography, and stage lighting where those cousins of the discipline have something to teach.
The hand-finishers
Our craft team works closest to the workshops themselves — finishes, glazes, patinas, polish levels, edge detail. This is where decisions like "slightly more burnish here" or "bring this edge softer" are tested, signed off, and kept consistent across batches. Most come from traditional craft backgrounds — metalsmithing, ceramics, glass — and many continue to make their own work outside of Liora.
They are also the most likely members of the studio to disagree with the rest of us, often correctly.
Disciplines we borrow from
No design studio works in isolation. Lighting design has its own vocabulary, but most of what we know we've borrowed from neighboring fields and made our own. These are the disciplines we look to most often.
For proportion, scale, and how an object holds a room.
For materiality, joinery, and the relationship between body and surface.
For how light shapes mood and directs attention through a space.
For color temperature, exposure, and the science of seeing.
For how light fades into space, and the geometry of a glowing point at distance.
For technique, patience, and the long view of how an object survives use.
For systems thinking and the ergonomics of objects we live with.
For organic geometry, branching forms, and how living things hold light.
"The fixture isn't the point. The point is the room after the fixture is in it — the way people gather, slow down, look at each other in a softer light."
How a fixture becomes a fixture
A new piece typically takes between six months and two years from first sketch to first shipment. Here's the rhythm.
Brief & observation
A piece begins with a question, not a drawing. What's missing in the way our clients light a particular kind of room? What do we keep wishing existed? We spend weeks observing, photographing, and arguing — long before anyone reaches for a pencil.
Sketching & mockups
Forty to sixty sketches narrow to four or five candidates. Those candidates become foam-core or 3D-printed full-size mockups, hung in our studio test rooms with appropriate bulbs and dimmers. We live with them. Most are quietly killed off.
First samples
The surviving design moves to our workshops as a real-material first sample. This is when many designs fail in good ways — the brass reads heavier than expected, the glass diffuses too much, a join doesn't sit right. Iteration here can take three or four full sample rounds.
Refinement & testing
Once form is settled, we refine: finishes, electrical components, mounting hardware, packaging, weight balance, lead times. Beta units are tested in real installations — sometimes our own homes, sometimes trusted designer partners — for at least six months before launch.
Launch & ongoing review
A successful design enters the production schedule, ships to clients, and is photographed for the catalogue. We keep a living document for every piece — feedback, adjustments, supplier changes — and revisit it annually. Some designs we improve. A few we quietly retire.
Curious about our work?
Browse the collection, or visit us in person