September 21, 2025For John Ballon and Elizabeth Vitanza, co-owners of vintage and modern design dealer Two Enlighten, necessity is the mother of reinvention. In 2012, the partners in business and in life bought a 1930s Spanish Revival home in Glendale, California. Ballon, then an advertising copywriter for film and television with a jones for mid-century design and the earthy California ceramics of Robert Maxwell and David Cressey, soon realized their new nest needed wall sconces and ceiling fixtures. Once just an ardent collector, he rapidly reinvented himself as a scholarly buyer and then purveyor of illumination.
“I was discovering a whole world of lighting that was sculpture and art for the room,” he recalls of first seeing designs by Max Ingrand, the artistic director of Fontana Arte from 1954 to 1967; and Gino Sarfatti, the founder of Arteluce.
“I had specific choices for key spots, such as an Ingrand 1963 model lamp for a bar nook,” Ballon remembers. “I had to have that light, and when I was searching for that, I’d find other things that were valuable. I’d sell two lamps and buy four more and then sell them. That was my way of financing the designs I wanted.”
“It was a side hustle,” says Vitanza, who in 2013, while heading up the world-languages program at the prestigious Marlborough prep school in Los Angeles, also built the Two Enlighten website. Two years later, the couple opened a 600-square-foot showroom in a 1950s International Style building near their Glendale home. Soon, they got an invitation to expand their reach as part of 1stDibs. “When 1stDibs comes calling, you say yes,” Vitanza says. “And it completely changed our business.”
In the 10 years since, Ballon and Vitanza have retired from their previous jobs, added a 1,700-square-foot warehouse and strategically supplemented their vintage stock with a curated selection of lighting and furniture in current production. The combined inventory includes 1930s designs by Alvar Aalto; mid-century classics from Carl Auböck, Ilmari Tapiovaara and Mathieu Matégot; and 21st-century creations by GamFratesi, as well as Jaime Hayon rugs for Nanimarquina.
“We ended up getting into new pieces because we’d get requests for ten of the same lights from architects and interior decorators, and it was difficult to source the vintage versions, but many of the designs remain in production or have been reeditioned,” Ballon explains. Two Enlighten is now an authorized dealer for international brands like Foscarini, Fritz Hansen, Artek, Artemide, Vitra and Gubi and the exclusive 1stDibs dealer for Stilnovo, Louis Poulsen and Tom Dixon.
Noting a distinct lack of iconic mid-century outdoor lighting, Ballon and Vitanza approached the Swedish company Örsjö, which had the rights to the Tratten, an elegantly proportioned conical design by Hans-Agne Jakobsson. “It is the Eames lounge of outdoor Scandinavian lighting, and I could never find enough vintage examples to keep in stock,” Ballon says. In 2021, he ordered wall-sconce and hanging versions of the light in copper and brass and partnered with a company that does metal finishing for Disney theme parks to produce richly patinated models.
This summer, Ballon and Vitanza sold their home and relocated with their teenage son to Canada, leaving their Glendale showroom in the capable hands of their sales manager, Michael Zufelt, a former set decorator. “During the pandemic, we learned how to work remotely,” Vitanza says. Adds Ballon, “We moved here for adventure and new sourcing opportunities while regularly traveling back to L.A. to run our business.”
Ballon and Vitanza recently spoke with Introspective from their home in Victoria, British Columbia, about Italian and Finnish design, saying farewell to favorite pieces and their personal lighting bugaboos.
Tito Agnoli Nickel and Travertine Model #387 Agnoli Floor Lamp for Oluce. The matte-yellow-glazed ceramic planter is by Gainey Pottery. Photo by Dan Arnold Photo
How do the designs you collected for your nineteen-thirties Spanish Revival house work in your new home?
John Ballon: It’s a ten-year-old modernist box, and our mid-century pieces — by Jean Prouvé, Charles and Ray Eames, Arne Jacobsen, Val Bertoia — fit perfectly and have transformed the house.
We only kept one of the existing light fixtures, a Moooi pendant, and added Fritz Hansen’s new Clam light over the Prouvé Standard dining table and three Vilhelm Lauritzen Radio House pendants in the kitchen. And we have Isamu Noguchi Akari lights, which are sculptures. The way the light passes through the washi paper is so earthy it’s like it launders an LED bulb.
Do you have any lighting aversions?
Elizabeth Vitanza: We’re into coziness and warmth. Sometimes, you walk into a room, and the bulbs are so bright it’s like you’ve entered an interrogation room.
Ballon: That’s why we sell Tala bulbs that dim to a warm glow and mimic incandescent. We don’t want anyone to put a shitty LED in a lamp!
And I’ve always avoided selling vintage lights that require lampshades. I always loved vintage Martz lamps, but I avoided them because I couldn’t figure out what kind of shades they needed.
Are there designs that took you a little while to warm to?
Vitanza: Some of the vintage Italian stuff can get a little kooky.
Ballon: They did a lot of magic with voluptuous shapes and perforated shades, but decoration is what dates design, like fins on a car. If people can’t name a time period when they look at something, then the designer has succeeded.
There are these really cool nineteen-sixties bubble lamps by the Finnish glass designer Helena Tynell, who was married to Paavo, that I always thought were a bit kitsch until I saw how beautifully the light passes through them.
What pieces that you currently offer on 1stDibs exemplify your aesthetic?
Vitanza: The Gelato lamp by Carlo Nason for Mazzega, a late-nineteen-sixties, early-seventies design reeditioned by Established & Sons as a portable, rechargeable light that looks like a scoop of ice cream in a dish. Lighting should be fun and a conversation starter.
Ballon: Every time I find a Gino Sarfatti 155, I buy it. Sarfatti was like the Leonardo da Vinci of lighting, with some seven hundred designs attributed to him. The 155 is a classic with a good scale, twenty-three inches in diameter, that sits flat on the ceiling and looks like a bowl with a brass detail around the rim. It has an adjustable brass dome over the bulb with perforations that let the light through like a constellation. It captures you with its cleanness. In a situation where you might put a chandelier, this is a much more interesting option.
What’s the rarest vintage item you’ve acquired?
Ballon: I started collecting Robert Maxwell’s ceramics when I was a garage-sale hound with very little money. I ended up befriending him around fifteen years ago, and on my very first visit, I fell hard for a three-by-five-foot ceramic wall sculpture with a sunburst motif. The sunburst had become his signature design, but this was its first incarnation, circa 1963 to 1964, and in my opinion and his, the prime example. When the piece came up at an auction held to benefit his widow, I knew I had to have it. It weighed three hundred pounds, and in order to hang it in my home, I needed to have a custom mounting bracket fabricated. I had a lamp angled on the piece so it looked like a relief map, and I would have my coffee and just stare at it every morning. We’d had it crated and ready to ship to Canada when a buyer paid nearly $85,000 for it. Thankfully, I have a smaller version of that piece, which I purchased on my first visit with Maxwell, and I have kept that.
Are there other designs you’d have a hard time letting go of?
Vitanza: For years, we had nineteen-fifties Stilnovo sconces on very slim metal rods mounted on each side of the piano. My son was in tears when we finally sold them.
Ballon: I have a completely impractical affinity for Stilux Milano table lamps that are like little jewels of sculpture with tripod legs and adjustable visors. Pure decoration. You could never read by them. But we own a lighting business, so we can keep one damned thing.
Which lighting designers and manufacturers deserve a little more recognition?
Vitana: Motoko Ishii designed for German companies in the nineteen sixties. I love her simplicity and the interplay of brass or chrome with opaline glass, which is understated but not fading into the background. It has the elegance of her Japanese design aesthetic with the precision of German manufacturing. She looks like a sweet grandma, but she’s a design badass.
Ballon: Some designers’ work, like Paavo Tynell’s, can be obscenely priced now. But Tynell designed for manufacturers that had a bench of designers — like Lisa Johansson-Pape and Mauri Almari — who were working in the same aesthetic and whose pieces are sometimes attributed to Tynell. I like turning people onto manufacturers they might not otherwise know about, like Valinte Oy, Taito Oy and Innolux Oy, from Finland, and Stilux Milano, in Italy.
Where do you look for education and inspiration?
Ballon: Volumes I and II of 1000 Lights, by Charlotte and Peter Fiell for Taschen. You have to have both, not the condensed single volume. They were my Rosetta stone and exposed me to all the luminaries, as well as some wonderfully obscure designers who helped shape my aesthetic and set the direction of my collecting.
What do you collect that might surprise people?
Ballon: I have a collection of jazz vinyl. In the late nineteen nineties to early two thousands, when the greats were dying off, I would see artists like Oscar Peterson, Pharoah Sanders and Ahmad Jamal and have them autograph my records. I love music photography. I have a William Claxton shot of Chet Baker, and my holy grail is to get a portrait of Duke Ellington by Herman Leonard.
What designs do you covet?
Ballon: Gio Ponti, any of it, it’s so magnificent.
Vitana: A Charlotte Perriand bookcase or all-wood chaise. And I would never be mad if someone wanted to put a Poul Henningsen glass Artichoke lamp in my house.
What emerging trends do you see in residential lighting?
Ballon: The younger generation that is furnishing homes now is getting into the nineteen seventies and eighties — things like chrome and Memphis are now cool again. But what we really love is how some designers are bringing outdoor lighting with rich, moss-like patinas indoors. To have the courage to juxtapose those in rooms with marble and wood, it’s surprising and quite beautiful.
