Michael Anastassiades closes his lighting brand after twenty years

May 8. Michael Anastassiades announced the closure of his lighting brand. The Cyprus-born designer founded the studio in 2007, built a catalog of spheres and linear brass systems that showed up in Copenhagen hotels and Milan showrooms for two decades. Production ends this month.

The statement, posted to the brand's site, frames the decision as a pivot toward process over product. "What comes next for me as a designer is a deeper focus on the creative process, and the freedom to explore new directions in design, in all its forms." No mention of financial pressure, no mention of a buyer. Archive pieces remain available through the studio's network of dealers.

The timing is clean. The lighting market has been crowded for five years. Flos owns half the hotels, Artemide owns the other half, and smaller studios have been consolidating or going dormant. Anastassiades never chased volume. The catalog stayed tight, prices stayed high, and the pieces moved slowly. That was the model. It worked until it didn't.

TheIC Light series, the sphere-and-stem fixtures that defined the studio's first decade, still reads as current. Look 14 from the 2018 catalog is structurally identical to pieces shipping in 2026 from three other studios. The silhouette became the category. That's the risk of designing a thing so clean it becomes a template.

What's next is unspecified. The statement leaves room for collaborations, one-offs, consulting work. The designer is 54. Two decades is a long run for a single-founder lighting studio. Most fold or sell at ten. This one ran clean and closed on its own terms.