Lighting designer Michael Anastassiades recently turned his hand to a new chair and table for Danish furniture house Fritz Hansen. He speaks about his new collection, the importance of knowing your design history and what makes lighting such a unique realm within design
I was always very attracted to light,” says Michael Anastassiades, the Cypriot-born, London-based designer who has built a reputation over the past three decades as one of the world’s pre-eminent lighting designers. After studying civil engineering at Imperial College London and industrial design at the Royal College of Art, he launched his eponymous studio in 1994 and began creating what he describes as “experimental work questioning the role of design”. In 2001, for instance, he designed the Social Light, which switched on when people spoke in its vicinity; and the Anti-Social Light, which only illuminated in silence.
Portrait by Fritz Hansen
Some 15 years later, Anastassiades decided to explore industrial production. “I decided to set up my own brand and focus on lighting, because I wanted to do things in the least compromised manner,” he says. “I felt that if I was to do it exceptionally well, I had to focus on one type of design.”
For more than a decade, Anastassiades’ studio has focused predominantly on lighting. At Milan Design Week earlier this year, he unveiled a number of collections, including the Cygnet, a delicate light made from Japanese washi paper that was inspired by his childhood memories of flying kites. “I wanted to create these pieces that are incredibly light and feel as though they’re flying in space,” he says. “Also, you don’t actually see the source of light, so they feel like they’re glowing from within, which is magical.”
Photography by Nicolò Panzeri
The Cygnet collection captures so much of what Anastassiades loves about lighting and what makes his work so unique. “Lighting is special, because it has two lives,” he explains. “For 80 per cent of a lamp’s life it’s off, so you have to design it as a sculptural object. But when you turn the light on, something different happens.” Suddenly, it changes your perception of the volume of the space and begins to interact with the objects in it, catching surfaces and casting shadows. “You don’t physically touch it; you feel it, experience it, sense it.”
Recently, Anastassiades has turned his attention to designing objects you do physically interact with. At 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen in June, he launched the After series, a chair and table for Fritz Hansen. As a diligent student of design history, he appreciates the way Danish designers have always shown a great awareness of their predecessors. By naming the series After, Anastassiades is consciously celebrating what came before him: both Fritz Hansen’s 153-year history and the history of Danish design more broadly. He laments that the design industry seems to have lost its understanding of the past. “Every designer has a responsibility to know the history of design,” he says. “Today there is an absence of design criticism. Designers claim that they’re the first to do something, but they’re never placed in context.”
The After chair, which Anastassiades likes to call the “protagonist of the collection”, takes inspiration from a variety of iconic Danish designs, including Poul Kjærholm’s PK12 chair. When he first saw the PK12, he loved the “sense of generosity in the seat size, the proportions, the curves, which all made me want to sit in this chair”. His design seeks to replicate and build on that feeling through the softness of the formed plywood, the generous proportions, the scooping of the seat and the curve of the backrest. For Anastassiades, it was important that the chair be comfortable to occupy as well as visually inviting, evoking curiosity and a desire to interact. “It’s important to differentiate between actual physical comfort and perceived comfort, which is the appeal of an inviting piece of furniture,” he says. “You have to navigate that and draw the line between aesthetics and actual comfort.”
The plan, according to Anastassiades, is for the After series to continue beyond this chair and the accompanying dining table. Meanwhile, he’s working on an exhibition in Greece that will launch in November, which will allow him to explore “more experimental ideas”, he says. He is also working on a project within the European Union buildings in Brussels to coincide with Cyprus’ holding of the presidency of the Council of the EU in the first half of 2026. And of course, there will be more lighting, “for both new and existing partners”. Clearly, this is one designer whose energy and creative ambition remain undimmed.
This story was originally featured in OnOffice 172, Autumn 2025. Discover similar stories by subscribing to our weekly newsletter here
