Good lighting can make or break a space, and designing fixtures that expertly illuminate rooms, settings, and essentially, our experiences, is not as easy as flipping a switch. For award-winning Italian designer Davide Groppi, light is a "wonderful way to seduce and excite," wherein each lamp design or lighting project carries leitmotifs of simplicity, weightlessness, emotion, creative invention, and amazement.

Since the late 80s, Groppi has been conceiving sophisticated lighting designs that not only illuminate spaces but evoke feelings and reactions. From pure lines of light seemingly racing across rooms to luminaires attesting to dreams of bringing the moon inside, Groppi’s innovations in light go beyond the design of fixtures—they create moods by understanding how artificial light behaves in spaces, intersecting with people, and objects, and most of all, light’s eternal flirtation with the dark—the non-light as an entity itself.

In conversation with STIR, the creator expounds on the intricacies of designing lighting solutions for over 40 years now, and what differentiates the brand and the designer Davide Groppi.

On the face of it, the stark subtlety of his lighting solutions might seem obvious but are delightfully clever, switching on to narrate spatial stories. In his enigmatic and comfortable designs, light, emotion, and pure function remain in a perpetual, clean, and essential dialogue, seeking context and taking on personalities within spaces. “Creative independence, passion, and unconventional management have allowed him overtime to develop his own brand of original and unique products, currently distributed the world over,” the company states.

Preferring the terms ‘artist, inventor, and narrator of light’ instead of a lighting designer or manufacturer, Groppi (born in 1963 in Piacenza, Italy) grew up tinkering, designing, and constructing mechanical objects with his father, who not only taught him how to put things together or create from spare parts but also to conceive solid things. Together, they built a pinball machine, a telegraph, and a lamp, the latter sparking Groppi’s interest in lighting. He went on to set up a tiny laboratory in the historical centre of his hometown in the late 1980s, inventing, producing, and selling his first lamp designs, and simply using his name as the company's. “In 1985, when I started, I accidentally came across the work of Ingo Maurer and was extremely fascinated by it,” he mentions to STIR in an exclusive conversation.

“It was an act of rebellion against the common concept of work” that led Groppi to establish his eponymous company, he reveals. “Davide Groppi was one of the first companies to grasp the innovative power of LEDs, not to power the lamps already in production differently, but by imagining projects that couldn't have been realised before the arrival of LEDs—I think of projects such as NULLA, INFINITO, PABLO, TeTaTeT, [...are] all acts of disobedience in the name of innovation. A technology, that of LEDs, has allowed us to translate a certain way of understanding the project into light, against the common models of making lamps, with unconventional attitudes, and always with great simplicity and inventiveness,” he answers, citing some of the greatest achievements for Davide Groppi as a company.

So where does Davide Groppi the designer differ from Davide Groppi, the company? “They don't differ at all,” he answers. “In everything I do, I find the good and the bad of who I am. In some ways it has also been my strong point, representing myself with coherence and persistence.”

Over the last four decades, Groppi’s creations have come about through a need to give life to something necessary or significant, and inspiring his ideas are works of art, ready-made objects, ‘magic,’ the desire to create things with his hands, or simply, “the urge to play and have fun with light,” as the company relays. Now an internationally successful and recognised lighting brand, Davide Groppi has developed product designs, projects, as well as shows in collaboration with companies specialising in design. They have illuminated homes, stores, museums, and restaurants, being particularly active in the hospitality sector, where some of the most famous chefs have chosen their thoughtful lighting solutions for their venues, including Albert Adrià, Massimo Bottura, Massimiliano Alajmo, Moreno Cedroni, and others.

Groppi’s passion for light is apparent in some of his most celebrated luminaires including the elegant and gestural SAMPEI floor lamp (2011), magical in its ability to make one look up using light as a weightless hook. Designed with Enzo Calabrese, SAMPEI quotes obvious inspiration from fishing rods, flexible and telescopic, the subtle branches of a willow tree or bamboo canes swaying with a light breeze. “The light is the fisherman’s line, catching faces, gazes, people,” Davide Groppi explains. PABLO (2015), conversely, is a frameless luminous panel that leans against walls as if waiting to be suspended. The colour and brightness of the floor lamp can be remotely controlled, as it rests patiently as a square neon entryway—"a luminous picture, the expression of the third fundamental state of light,” to quote the creator.

"A timeless icon with an eye on the future," TeTaTet (2013) is a portable and rechargeable table lamp designed as “the greatest expression of freedom,” equipped with touch technology and a magnetic fixing base. “With TeTaTeT, every table becomes a meeting place, a complete dining experience. Its light caresses those it illuminates with pure emotion,” the company conveys. Meanwhile, ORIGINE (2020) cites the Latin word origo (translating to start, birth, and source) as its concept, emerging as a bud from the ground and soaring towards the sky, its stem thinning out. “ORIGINE sculpts and enhances every environment with its indirect light, which is intentionally non-invasive, graphic, and fascinating,” they explain.

He also considers the NULLA (2010) recessed lamp to represent both the beginning and end of their work on light—“It is the beginning, in the sense that we have always been looking for absolute light, one coming from a distance, almost without a source. It’s the end in that every time we look at NULLA, we feel as though we can’t get it better than that,” he says. An extreme expression of subtraction according to him, NULLA unites optics and electronics in an almost cunning answer to the ultimate challenge—the absence of structural support and the essence of light. Also described as “the most generous of our lamps,” by the product designer, NULLA generates light and propagates mystery [with] its sole objective of [hiding] and [giving] all the attention to whatever it is lighting. “What we see is only a tiny black hole, as if it were drawn on the ceiling,” he proceeds to elaborate.

All his contemporary design solutions are simple and effectual as they interact creatively vis-à-vis three states of light—Direct, the one that welcomes, gathers together and takes its leave by creating an accompanying shadow; Indirect, the light that underlines the capacity of spaces in its absence of shadows; and Diffused, the ‘dressed light’ which makes everything softer and sensual in a space—lightweight light that exists in a delicate and respectful interplay between the direct and indirect.

The Italian brand’s extensive lighting range has won numerous prestigious design awards over the years, including the Edida Award (2011) for SAMPEI; the Design Plus Award (2014) for NEURO; two awards at the 23rd edition of the ADI Compasso d’Oro Awards for NULLA and SAMPEI; and the 24th edition of the ADI Compasso D’Oro Mention of Honour Award for TeTaTeT. Since 2018, the company has also been a part of Dexelance (previously Italian Design Brands), strengthening its already valuable presence in international markets. In 2019, Davide Groppi joined the Altagamma Foundation, the creative and cultural ecosystem that accelerates Made in Italy products.

Their latest collection comprising 14 new lamps results from a long listening period of a few years. “Ultimately, I chose what represented us, what we needed or enjoyed telling. [With this] I introduced the theme of invention and illusion more forcefully. These are topics that interest me a lot and which will certainly guide us for the future,” Groppi tells STIR. “On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2024 from April 16 - 21, we are going to present the new collection #MDW24 in our new showroom in the heart of the city, at Via Alessandro Manzoni 38, 20121 Milano, Italy—a place of meeting, representation, [and] seduction, in which light is the protagonist,” he adds.

Tap the head banner to watch STIR’s interview with Davide Groppi.