Lumina Flo Floor

Renowned among architects and interior designers for its slender and unassuming table lamps, pendants and floor lamps in brushed nickel and varnish-coated aluminum, Italian manufacturer Lumina has been producing lighting solutions for residential and commercial properties all over the globe for several decades. 

Lumina is the brainchild of founder Tommaso Cimini, a Milanese lighting designer who worked as a technician at Artemide prior to establishing his own firm. In 1975, he created a prototype of a very minimalist table lamp — it comprised little more than an articulated arm, a modest-sized diffuser and a transformer that, instead of being tucked inside the base, was visible to anyone who stopped by Cimini’s workbench to admire his clever fixture. 

Cimini’s idea — “lots of light, not much lamp” — was the catalyst for the Daphine table lamp, a deceptively simple design that debuted at the Milan Trade Fair to considerable critical acclaim. 

Based on the success of the now-iconic Daphine lamp, Cimini formed Lumina in Sedriano, a town in Milan, in 1980. The new decade marked the start of an albeit brief era of postmodern design, which would yield innovative, unconventional furnishings and decorative objects in Cimini’s native Italy from the likes of the Memphis Group and others. Together with several notable figures in the field of lighting design, including Riccardo Blumer, Yaacov Kaufman, Walter Monici and Emanuele Ricci, Cimini’s firm created a range of sculptural fixtures in appealing contemporary styles. 

There were Monici’s Tangram metal and aluminum table lamps, which feature a jointed arm and reflector that rotates 360 degrees. Elsewhere, Kaufman’s Matrix pendant light was made of aluminum and steel with 16 moveable arms fitted with halogen or fluorescent bulbs. In the subsequent years, Lumina opened branches in Switzerland and Germany and collaborated with British architecture and design firm Foster + Partners to create sleek pieces such as the Flo desk lamp, Ilium pendant lamp and EVA glass table lamp.

Cimini died in 1997, leaving Lumina to his son Ettore, who runs the company today. Several Lumina lamps, particularly the Daphine, are held in the collections of museums such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and more, and the company’s fixtures are sold in more than 100 countries all over the world. 

Find vintage Lumina table lamps, floor lamps and other lighting on 1stDibs.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.

The modern floor lamp is an evolution of torchères — tall floor candelabras that originated in France as a revolutionary development in lighting homes toward the end of the 17th century. Owing to the advent of electricity and the introduction of new materials as a part of lighting design, floor lamps have taken on new forms and configurations over the years. 

In the early 1920s, Art Deco lighting artisans worked with dark woods and modern metals, introducing unique designs that still inspire the look of modern floor lamps developed by contemporary firms such as Luxxu. 

Popular mid-century floor lamps include everything from the enchanting fixtures by the Italian lighting artisans at Stilnovo to the distinctly functional Grasshopper floor lamp created by Scandinavian design pioneer Greta Magnusson-Grossman to the Paracarro floor lamp by the Venetian master glass workers at Mazzega. Among the more celebrated names in mid-century lighting design are Milanese innovators Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, who, along with their eldest brother, Livio, worked for their own firm as architects and designers. While Livio departed the practice in 1952, Achille and Pier Giacomo would go on to design the Arco floor lamp, the Toio floor lamp and more for legendary lighting brands such as FLOS. 

Today’s upscale interiors frequently integrate the otherworldly custom lighting solutions created by a wealth of contemporary firms and designers such as Spain’s Masquespacio, whose Wink floor lamps integrate gold as well as fabric fringes. 

Visual artists and industrial designers have a penchant for floor lamps, possibly because they’re so often a clever marriage of design and the functions of lighting. A good floor lamp can change the mood of any room while adding a touch of elegance to your entire space. Find yours now on 1stDibs.