Six lighting designs we discovered at London Design Festival 2025

This year's London Design Festival offered some great moments of discovery, with emerging designers and independent studios taking over the city, opening their spaces and offering new approaches to creation and making. Along the way, we discovered some new lighting designs that caught our attention for their mix of ingenuity, functionality and beauty. From brands such as Tala, a regular fixture of London Design Festival who this year aimed to tackle an ongoing problem of our generation with a new lighting device to Raw Edges' lighting venture returning for a second year, from emerging design ideas by the likes of Six Dots and Yoonjeong Lee, illumination was central to our week.

Here, we bring you six lighting designs that caught our attention at London Design Festival 2026

Raw Edges for LightMass^

After launching the brand last year, Raw Edges and LightMass^ return with a new series of pendant lights that explore the design possibilities of the brand's experiments in additive technology and bio-based filaments. Featuring the same distinctive mesh shade of the launch collection, these sculptural, imposing pieces are an effortless decorative presence in a space. 'We wanted to achieve something sculptural and impressive that will be a pillar in space,' Alkalay told us when the company launched. 'At the same time we wanted it to be light in weight - almost like a mobile that can react to any little movement of air - and with a low carbon footprint through the light usage of material.'

'Wake' by Thomas Heatherwick for Tala

Launched at Tala’s Rivington Street store, this new lamp is three years in the making: ‘Wake’ is Heatherwick Studio’s response to our dependance on screens in the bedroom. Part bedside lamp, part circadian-aware sleep aid, it pairs hand-glazed ceramic and pressed glass with programmable light and sound sequences designed to help users wind down at night and wake gently in the morning – no harsh blue-light-emitting screens required. Ali Morris

Plug by Dean Edmonds

British designer Dean Edmonds' practice is rooted in ultra-functionalism and a no-nonsense approach to making. There is a sense of DIY in his work, often featuring raw metals and visible welding in a graceful way that adds sophistication and curiosity to the process. For Das Programm at System Studios: DP: CDRA, an exhibition of contemporary designs rooted in functionality, Edmonds created a wall lamp that very simply plugs into a socket, is connected to a bulb, and shaded by a perforated, curved piece of metal. It is everything an industrial design object should be: essential, functional and honest.

Six Dots

At Wallpaper*, we have admired the work of Joe Ellwood of Six Dots for a few years, and it's always exciting to see new pieces come from his experimental, hands-on studio. Among new welded pieces on show in Shoreditch this year, was this table lamp. 'This little drop of work has really been about trying to make things that feel intensely precious,' Ellwood explained. 'We bought a forge to cast our own aluminium a few months ago and immediately the objects that came out of the sand felt organic, otherworldly and precious.

‘Abiogenesis: Vol . 1’ by Abid Javed

For his London Design Festival showcase, designer Abid Javed has drawn on his training as a molecular scientist and his knowledge of structural and mitochondrial biology. The result is a series of otherworldly lamps that appear as if they are grown rather than made by hand, echoing the early stages of biogenesis. Javed makes the modular pieces in a variety of clay bodies, pairing ceramic bases with detachable shades, which can be interchanged. The collection, called ‘Abiogenesis: Vol . 1’, blurs the line between art, design and science. Ali Morris

Yoonjeong Lee

The highlights at the Charlotte Taylor-curated space at The Lavery, part of the Alex Tieghi-Walker-curated 'A Softer World' showcase, were too many to name. Set up as a small apartment full of life, treasure and curiosities, it looked like its inhabitants had just momentarily stepped out and you were allowed in for a peek. We particularly admired this desk lamp, made by Korean designer Yoonjeong Lee and featuring a pencil holding the shade in place. It is a highly symbolic tool for the designer: 'When writing, a pencil is a form of thought, when writing a letter, it is a bridge that connects emotions between people, when used as a tool of study, the pencil is an agent that gains knowledge and opens new possibilities,' she explains.