Best Lighting Design Brands Leading Smart LED Innovation
Best Lighting Design Brands Leading Smart LED Innovation
https://monocle.com/business/technology/lighting-brands-smart-led-design-innovation/
Publish Date: 2026-07-01 07:20:00
Source Domain: monocle.com
Well-thought-out lighting can improve the quality of design in any space. And it’s an area of product and technological development that’s rapidly improving thanks to innovations that have narrowed the gap between incandescent bulbs and leds. Monocle profiles five brands that are leading lights in the field.
Bespoke brightness
Occhio, Germany
“It’s just like magic,” says Axel Meise as he holds his hand near a circular light fixture, called Mito, that’s hovering above a table in his Munich office. The light dims and Meise, the founder of German lighting company Occhio, which makes Mito, explains the logic of its design. “You can be the director of your atmosphere: with a simple gesture, you can decide the intensity, colour and where you want to position the light.”
Occhio’s rotatable and dimmable Lei luminaire
Axel Meise
Mito lights
This, he says, is the power of the brand’s technology. And it’s a technology that sets Occhio apart from its competitors: the Bavarian operation has an in-house team of engineers developing its own electronic systems to work with its luminaires. Such a set-up is unusual in the lighting world but Meise explains to Monocle, when it visits Occhio’s HQ, that it was a necessity born out of a number of challenges the brand has faced since its early days.
“In the 1990s I was working as a lighting dealer and saw that architects and interior designers wanted the right quality of light for every room but for the luminaries to be consistent in terms of design concept and materiality,” says Meise. “That didn’t exist.” In response, Meise established Occhio in 1999 and launched his first product line, Puro, a modular system of luminaires with interchangeable heads that, despite being limited in range, could be combined in many ways. It was a hit and Occhio’s star product line in these early years.
However, Puro’s reliance on incandescent bulbs meant that when the EU began…
