I am an avid collector of antiques, objects, and natural history. One of my most inspiring places to be is in a big antiques market or warehouse. I also take inspiration from the natural world, particularly anatomy, and the built environment (architecture). I spend time in these environments; I process the shapes, the proportions, I analyze the things that excite me and try to uncover the reasons why they excite me. I have ideas turning over in my head sometimes for years before I seek to realize them into a design. It’s the ideas that are still in my head after many years that I know will be successful and are worth pursuing.

I will spend my morning going over emails and checking in with my team of 7 staff, making sure they’re all up-to-speed with what needs to be achieved in the day. I’m currently renovating a showroom space for the business, so these days there will be a lot of liaising with the tradespeople and interior designer, and visiting the new property to make sure that’s all moving smoothly as well. I generally do a little bit of everything at work – some production, some sales and dispatching. I will meet with my industrial designer, discuss the latest version of a component we have 3D printed overnight, or touch base on the progress of the new pieces we’ll be showing for Milan Design Week 2025. My favourite thing to do at work is build new prototypes and art pieces. It’s important for me to personally build new pieces for the first time, rather than have my team build them.

The main materials I work with are brass and glass. These materials have a long legacy in lighting design, and I like the idea of sticking to traditional lighting materials, but creating designs that are far from traditional. Brass can be so robust, but also have such a delicate surface. It can be gold and flashy; it can be dark and moody. It collects handprints and tells its own story. More recently I have been getting into cast bronze and aluminium. There is something so solid and permanent about these materials and the process. I’ve also been working with Four Seasons Quartzite a lot. I’m obsessed with the colours – the purples, greens, greys, rust colours. Colours that shouldn’t look good together, but in the context of this stone, they just work.