2025 was a year obsessed with presentation. Everything needed to be clear, formatted, easy to digest, and understandable by everyone. Everything needed to be optimized for peak efficiency. Work, identity, taste, even rest, everything needed to be explained quickly and improved immediately to justify its existence.
Homes felt that pressure too.
Somewhere along the way, rooms started auditioning for outside approval more than they existed for the comfort of the people who used them every day. We trained our spaces to look finished at all times, primed for content creation. We made sure they were carefully arranged to signal taste to strangers without revealing too much about ourselves in the process.
We treated aesthetics as armor. But armor is cold, rigid, and distant.
And armored rooms don’t hold memories very well.
The spaces that stay with us, the ones we wish we could return to, are often the most vulnerable. They belong to people who stopped asking if something was correct and simply did what felt true to them. More often than not, what made those rooms feel complete wasn’t perfection.
It was the lighting.
Lighting is powerful.
Lighting decides how long people stay. It determines whether a room feels like an invitation or a display. It changes how we speak, how we listen, and how honest we’re willing to be. It’s why a lamp that doesn’t match anything else still works if it sets the right mood. It’s why a corner can feel calmer and more important at night than it ever does during the day. Light reveals a room, sure. But more importantly, it shapes the feeling and the behavior inside it. We’ve noticed this not just in homes, but in culture at large. People are waking up to the ways lights tell their story.
People are hungry to express their personality again. People are also less interested in appealing to consensus. There’s a growing fatigue around perfection and designing a life for spectators instead of participants. Homes are where that tension shows up first. The best homes we’ve noticed aren’t in a rush to be finished and have learned to treat their imperfections as signs of life. They evolve as the people living in them do. In a world that encourages you to stay within the confines of the algorithm, designing spaces this way can feel risky.
But what’s life without risk?
We’ve been thinking about that a lot ourselves.
This blog—the way it’s evolved, the way it’s begun to sound less like a machine and more like a record of honest observation— is one of those risks. It’s a step away from telling you who you should be or what formulas to follow, and a step closer to supporting you as you figure out how to light and design spaces you love, or hope others love staying in.
Risk doesn’t have to be dramatic.
Sometimes it’s just choosing what you actually like, even when it goes against the grain. Admitting you prefer dim lighting. Quiet mornings. Breakfast for dinner on the couch next to your favorite lamp, even when you own a perfectly good table. Lighting, in that way, becomes a small but powerful declaration. It says: This room isn’t here to impress anyone. It’s here for me to live in.
In 2026, we hope you trust your instincts a little more, and take a few more risks.
Let your home evolve the way you do: unevenly, thoughtfully, and with a few contradictions intact. Let lighting work with you. Let it support how you actually move through your days and nights. Whether it’s a house with rooms still finding their purpose, or a studio apartment where one light does more work than it should, what matters isn’t scale or cost.
What matters is honesty.
So as the new year arrives, take a look around.
If your space feels a little unfinished, it’s okay.
If it feels personal, even better.
Tonight, toast to the rooms you’ll grow into.
Toast to the risks you’ll take.
Toast to the light you’ll live under.
We’re glad to be here with you—into the new year, and whatever you decide to make of it.