Beautifully Bulbous Light Fixtures from Three Design Studios

Mimicking the spherical nature of many bulbs, lighting designers with debuts during Milan Design Week took bulbous concepts and transformed them from simple to imperfectly extraordinary. By L.A.-based architect and interior designer Patrick Tighe, Venice, Italy-based artist and designer Irene Cattaneo, and the award-winning Czech Republic-based glass design studio and manufacturer Lasvit, three examples of globular fixtures set themselves apart from the thousands of releases during Salone del Mobile.

Within the walls of Palazzo Litta, “MoscaPartners Variations,” a group installation organized by Caterina Mosca and Valerio Castelli’s curatorial platform, featured Tighe’s aptly entitled Droop light fixtures. Here, glass appears to ooze out of its apparatus. Tighe collaborated with Italian artisans, “resulting in one-of-a-kind pieces, each a contemporary expression of their timeless craftsmanship,” he tells Surface.

Amidst an abundance of debuts at Milan’s legendary Rossana Orlandi design gallery, Cattaneo’s collaboration with furniture brand Meritalia included a plant bud-shaped sconce made of cast bronze and Murano glass—poetically named And I sunned it with my smiles / And with my tears it grew. Within the fixture, the Venetian designer incorporated a tinge of green, as well as iridescence, and bubbles, through the “sommerso” (submerged) glassblowing technique.

“I wanted to design a piece that created the feeling of anticipation before witnessing the moment of blooming, literally of a flower but metaphorically of a relationship,” Cattaneo shares with Surface. She looked first to William Blake’s poem “The Blossom,” a line from which lends the sconce its name. “The piece looks like a tear drop, but from the tear the flower blooms,” she adds. “I also wanted this glass body to feel heavy and layered in depth.”

In the halls of Euroluce 2025, Salone del Mobile’s international lighting exhibition, Lasvit exhibited several new collections in an immersive presentation titled “Soaked in Light.” All of the pieces addressed light’s relationship to water and our senses. Though Splash, by designer Martin Gallo, may have drawn the most eyes for the way the glass pieces represented water flying through the air, it was another collection, from Czech designer Jan Plecháč, named Niveo, that emulated the ephemeral beauty of hailstones with its organic round form. These sculptural vessels were crafted from hand-blown glass.