Three female lighting designers blend artistic inspiration and material exploration to illuminate your home, writes Riya Patel

Dubai-based designer Caroline Coirault-Jonqueres crafting her lamp bases

When it came to finding exciting lighting for her own home, the only options for Rowena Morgan-Cox were established design icons or trying her luck with vintage finds. The struggle to source something unique led the British creative to set up Palefire Studio: a London atelier making playful lighting in small batches. The venture brings together her background in fine art, and experience working with galleries and high-end design stores. “I knew I wanted to do something decorative, with a lot of pattern and color, and I wanted to have painted surfaces,” she says.

U/V Collection, Palefire’s debut range of table lamps, wall lights, ceiling and floor lamps are all made from the same material: recycled paper pulp. The raw forms, which come in five shapes that are mixed and matched, are sent to London where Palefire’s team hand-paints them with solid color, such as deep vermilion, or a pattern of wavy lines. “The paper pulp has this amazing texture, and the hand-painted color brings an intensity that can make it seem like it’s an entirely different material,” says Morgan-Cox.

Palefire’s Rowena Morgan-Cox. Photograph: Kim Lightbody Photography

Sustainability is important: natural paints low in volatile compounds—and thus better for humans and the environment—are used for the finish, and research is ongoing into other recycled materials for future projects. “We try as much as possible to have thoughtful practices without compromising on the aesthetic,” she says. “We don’t want our lighting to look like it’s recycled. We want it to look exuberant, with those sustainable elements in the background.” Part of that exuberance comes through the shapes these lamps take, inspired by the elegance of art nouveau or the playfulness of postmodernism and 1970s “space age” design. These are then brought to life by their painterly surfaces, and color palettes that take cues from artists such as postwar painter Helen Frankenthaler. 

The Pavilion table lamp, in brick, by Palefire. Photograph: Kim Lightbody Photography

Another designer identifying a gap in the market for art-led lighting is Dubai-based Caroline Coirault-Jonqueres, who observed a lack of options through working on high-end residential interiors. “In architecture, light is fundamental in shaping the experience of a space,” she says. “Yet decorative lighting is often overlooked. It can add real depth and presence to a room.” Inspired by the savoir faire of the craftspeople she had come to know through her work, the designer took the step of sketching out her own lamps for them to make. The resulting line of distinctive table lamps typically features linen shades and chunky, angular bases made in marble, natural oak or scorched cedar. They are currently sold through London gallery The House by M.A.H.

A curved lamp by Caroline Coirault-Jonqueres. Photograph: The House by M.A.H. and Ben Anders

Coirault-Jonqueres goes back and forth with the craftspeople via drawings, which are adjusted throughout the making process according to the whims of the material and how the piece is taking shape. “The skills and knowledge required to work a raw material into an object is what really inspires me,” she says. “Materiality, texture, a joint or a stitching detail… these small elements are all very significant to the end result.” She is drawn to earthy tones and materials, inspired by the Japanese wabi-sabi philosophy celebrating nature’s imperfections, and which she interprets as: “Showing that something has been made with intention.”

Lana Launay, a former jewelry designer who works between Sydney and Los Angeles, has a similar fascination with shape and material when it comes to designing sculptural lighting. Her made-to-order line of lamps is characterized by geometric paper shades and carved wood forms. Feels Like Home is a floor lamp standing on tall stacks of wooden spheres that recall beaded plant hangers from the 1970s, but Launay says her aesthetic inspiration is actually 20th-century brutalist sculpture and sci-fi set designs. “I admire the ‘what if?’ approach that you find in futuristic design, and I love the raw freedom and expression you see in brutalist sculpture and art,” she explains.

Lana Launay with her modular lamp. Photograph: Nic Gossage

Despite the avant-garde precedent, Launay’s material palette is strictly natural, including timber, raffia and paper stained by hand. “I have always been drawn towards warm tones—I find them calming and romantic,” she says. “I often use paper, including Japanese washi paper, as a textile because I find the glow (that shines through) more consistent, but the fibers are more unique.” The handmade lamps look incredibly lightweight—but this is also what makes them playful. For the Modular Launay Lamp, five different forms can be assembled as the user desires by threading them, like origami paper beads, onto a standing light source.

With warmth, charm and the imagination to look beyond lighting as just purely functional, these designers urge us to never overlook the humble floor or table lamp. “My designs are like a permanent guest rather than a piece of furniture,” says Launay. “With my work I want to create an illuminated presence that offers a sense of comfort in a room.”

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