decomag 8
lighting
Beam me up
Germany and Italy are home to great lighting brands. Occhio and Catellani & Smith offer very different products and looks but both inspire us to invest in enduring style and quality
This image: Occhio’s Sento lamp in desk and wall model. The lamp gives atmospheric pools of light when wall-mounted, while the desk lamp gives a highly focused beam for easy reading Below: Sento pendant lights hung over a dining table. Facing page, top left: Mito pendant light; top right, from left, designer Christoph Kügler and Occhio founder Axel Meise
Lighting is crucial to an interior and it has to be planned out at the start of a project. Lighting can’t be an afterthought. You need to know what lighting is needed where and how much light it needs to generate. Also, ideally all lighting should be dimmable. And if it can marry precision engineering with beauty so much the better. Which is why great lighting is expensive. Two leading but very differents brands which demonstrate what is meant
by good lighting are Germany’s Occhio and Italy’s Catellani & Smith. Occhio prides itself on ‘extraordinary design and exceptional quality’ which makes its products a joy to use. Architects love it because it has a certain mathematical precision to it and if you want to be sure a light is going to do its job properly, you won’t be disappointed. Founded in 1999 by Axel Meise, the company started out with what he decomag 8
