A sculpture featuring a large, pink, balloon-like sphere on top of a rectangular base with a yellow and brown checkerboard pattern.

June 25, 2026

Words: Georgina McWhirter

Art And Craft Merge In These Lighting Designs

Lighting with carefully composed details—rendered slowly and by hand—collapses the divide between art and craft.

A geometric ceramic sculpture with a yellow and brown checkered body, topped with a large pinkish glass sphere.
Photograpy by Patrick Young.
A colorful ceramic sculpture with a glossy yellow oval top, a white and brown speckled middle, and a tall green and brown base, standing on a white background.
Photograpy by Patrick Young.

Francesca Anfossi, the Italian-born, London-based cofounder of Rochester Square—an idyllic community garden and ceramics studio in the Camden neighborhood—hand-built her clay and blown-glass lamps, Helianthus and Gum, as canvases for layered slips and matte-and-gloss compositions that derive from her background as a painter. francescaanfossi.com

  • Clear glass table lamp with a wide, irregularly shaped top, decorated with colorful circular patterns and a visible internal light bulb.
    Photograpy by Annika Kafcaloudis.
  • A clear glass mushroom-shaped lamp with colorful circular and star patterns on both the shade and base.
    Photograpy by Annika Kafcaloudis.

Based in Melbourne, Australia, the design practice Volker Haug Studio debuts the Pilz collection of table lamps featuring decorative murrine patterns, made by layering colored Murano glass into candy cane–esque rods that are heated, then pulled like taffy and sliced to reveal gloriously detailed cross sections. volkerhaug.com

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