Against the light
A Milan studio that designs with shadow as much as with brass — and why dusk is its favourite material.
By Lu · 4 May 2026
Controluce means against the light, and the studio takes the instruction literally. They do not design lamps so much as design the shadows lamps make. The brass is incidental; the alabaster is incidental; what they are really shaping is the hour between afternoon and evening, when a room stops being a room and becomes a mood.
I went expecting objects and left thinking about time. A piece can take months, not because the work is slow but because they wait — for the right block of stone, the right patina, the right light to test it in.
There is a photograph of one of their rooms at dusk that sits, quietly, behind everything Ca'Øriginale is trying to be: ultra-modern lines in a warm, almost ancient glow. The culture of history, lit by the present.