LIGHTING
Muuto takes its name from the Finnish word muutos, meaning new perspective. The brand was founded in Copenhagen in 2006 with a deceptively simple ambition: take the Scandinavian design tradition, hand it to a roster of contemporary designers from across Europe and beyond, and see what happens when you let real working studios reinterpret what a lamp, a chair, or a vase should look like in the present day.
Two decades in, the lighting collection has become one of the clearest expressions of that idea. Muuto does not design lamps in-house. Instead, the brand commissions designers like Benjamin Hubert in London, TAF Studio in Stockholm, Broberg and Ridderstrale also in Stockholm, and Jamie Wolfond in Toronto, then lets each one bring their own material curiosity to the same brief. The result is a lighting program that has no single house style, but a deeply coherent point of view: light should feel quiet, warm, and a little surprising.
Below are five Muuto lamps that show that range. Each one solves a different lighting problem with a completely different design move. Together they sketch out what Muuto means when they say new perspective.
Strand Pendant
The Strand is the lamp that draws people across a showroom floor. From a distance it reads as a soft cloud of light suspended in space. Up close, its surface is made of thousands of tiny visible strands, and the steel skeleton inside subtly shows through when the bulb is on. It is one of those rare pieces where the material itself is the story.
The cocoon resin Benjamin Hubert chose for the Strand was originally developed as a weather-resistant skin sprayed onto turbines and cargo ships to protect them from sea air and salt corrosion. In the 1960s, designers figured out that if you spun a steel grid inside the spray, the cocoon would cling to it like a silkworm spinning around itself, and you could build hollow objects of any size. Hubert took that industrial process and reapplied it to lighting. Each Strand shade is built up in three stages: a fibre web, a cocoon plastic, and a protective top coating, all sprayed onto a steel frame.
The Strand is one of those rare lamps where the shade reads as well off as it does on. The cocoon has a presence to it during the day, almost like a textile, and then it warms up at night without losing that texture.
Jenna, Interior Design Specialist
The Strand comes in two silhouettes and a range of diameters. The Closed version is a soft rounded form that pushes light downward and outward through the cocoon walls. The Open version has a wider, flatter silhouette with an exposed top and bottom that lets direct light pour through, paired with the diffused glow from the walls. Diameters span from 17.7" up to 31.5" on the larger Closed shades, which means the same design language scales from an entry pendant to a real architectural anchor over a dining table.
Leaf Floor Lamp
The Leaf, designed by Swedish duo Mats Broberg and Johan Ridderstrale in 2012, is built around a single quiet idea: the same lamp can be two different objects depending on how you turn it. The shade is asymmetric, shaped loosely like a leaf, and it pivots a total of 100 degrees on its stem (50 to each side). Turn it edge-on and the lamp almost disappears into the room as a thin vertical line. Turn it face-on and the leaf becomes a graphic silhouette against the wall behind it.
The materials are honest and unfussy. Turned and cast aluminum, brass detailing, a strong powder coat, and an integrated LED with a 35,000-hour lifespan and built-in dimmer. Standing 46.5" tall on an 8.75" base, it is a slim, gentle floor lamp that does not crowd a corner or compete with a sofa.
Leaf is one of those pieces that rewards being in the same room as it for a few days. The asymmetry is not loud, but it changes the lamp from a static object into something you actually interact with. Available in white, black, grey, dark green, and copper brown.
Ambit Wall Lamp
The Ambit family was designed by TAF Studio, a Stockholm-based architecture and design practice founded by Gabriella Gustafson and Mattias Stahlbom in 2002. Their work sits in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and the Danish Design Museum in Copenhagen, and you can feel that museum-grade discipline in the Ambit shade itself. It is a soft cone with a sharp triangular profile that meets the cord at a single point at the top and opens up to release the light at the bottom.
The designers have said the construction reference for Ambit was the geometry of bike frames: the triangular form is what gives the shade its lightness even though it is solid spun aluminum. Each shade is press-spun by hand using old brazier techniques, then polished and wet-painted in a finishing process that gives the surface a deep, even colour. The white interior contrasts with the outer shade and bounces the light forward.
On the wall version, the arm rotates 120 degrees around the wall bracket and the shade itself pivots 60 degrees to either side, which means you can use the same lamp as task light at a desk, bedside reading light, or indirect bounce off a corner. The wall mount is designed to hide its hardware, so the cord can be routed back through the wall for a clean install, or left exposed and plugged in for a more relaxed, Scandinavian feel.
The Ambit adds something to a wall that a lot of clients do not realize they want until they see it, which is depth. The arm pulls the shade about sixteen inches off the wall, so the lamp casts its own shadow and gives the surface behind it a layer it would not have otherwise.
Jenna, Interior Design Specialist
The Ambit family extends well beyond the wall lamp. The Ambit Pendant uses the same cone in four sizes, from a small accent at 6.5" diameter up to a 21.7" statement piece, and the Ambit Rail Lamp mounts three of the cones on a single horizontal track for kitchen islands and dining tables. One silhouette carried across pendant, wall, and rail, with the proportions and placement adjusted to suit each application.
Set Table Lamp
The Set Table Lamp is the newest piece in this group, designed by Toronto-based Jamie Wolfond and added to the Muuto collection in 2024. Wolfond is one of a small but growing number of Canadian designers Muuto has commissioned in recent years (Tom Chung's Beam Lamp is another), and the Set is a confident debut.
The design move is mechanical and visible: the entire body of the lamp is a coarse screw thread, and the aluminum shade rides up and down those threads by hand. As Wolfond explained when the lamp launched, adjusting the distance between the reflector and the bulb does two things at once. It dims the light by changing how much of the beam escapes the shade, and it changes the radius of the pool of light cast on the surface below. A single adjustment controls both brightness and spread. The lamp can be a tight bright reading light when the shade is screwed down low, or a wide soft ambient glow when the shade is raised.
The construction is anodized aluminum for the body and shade, with a powder-coated underside on the shade acting as a diffuser. The integrated LED runs at 2700K with 800 lumens at full brightness and a 50,000-hour rated lifespan, and there is an inline dimmer on the cord for fine adjustment beyond the shade rotation.
The Set works because the mechanism is honest. There is no hidden dimmer or app to deal with, you just turn the shade. For clients who want something tactile in a room full of screens, it tends to be the lamp that wins them over.
Jenna, Interior Design Specialist
It is a sculptural object even when the lamp is off, which is what makes it work as easily on a sideboard or windowsill as it does on a desk. See the Set Table Lamp.
E27 Pendant
The E27 was designed in 2008 by Mattias Stahlbom, the same Stahlbom of TAF Studio behind the Ambit family. Where the Ambit is about subtle refinement, the E27 is about subtraction. The lamp is, almost literally, just a socket and a bulb. Stahlbom has spoken about where the idea came from: a stretch of his life in his twenties moving between mostly empty apartments in Stockholm, where the only constant in each new place was a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. He found something humbling and quietly romantic about that.
The E27 turns that observation into a lamp. The socket is pressed in vulcanised silicone rubber under high temperature, which gives it a soft, slightly matte texture that hard plastic could not produce. The bulb is exposed. The cord is colour-matched to the socket. Available in a wide range of colours, from black and white through to terracotta, dusty rose, light blue, and deep yellow.
The genius of the E27 is in how it scales. One pendant on its own over a small breakfast nook reads as quiet and almost utilitarian. Three in a row over a kitchen island becomes architecture. Ten or twelve clustered at varying heights from a multi-canopy reads as a modern chandelier. The lamp adapts to whatever scale you ask of it.
It is also one of the most accessible entry points into the Muuto lighting collection. If you have wanted a Muuto piece but the brand has felt out of reach, this is the lamp to start with.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Muuto lighting made?
Muuto is a Danish brand headquartered in Copenhagen. Production is distributed across Europe and Asia depending on the piece. The Strand is produced in Italy where the cocoon resin process is most established, the Ambit shades are press-spun by hand using old brazier techniques in Europe, and integrated-LED pieces like the Leaf and the Set are manufactured to Muuto's spec under tight quality control. Every piece is designed in Copenhagen.
Are Muuto lamps dimmable?
Most are, but the mechanism varies. The Leaf, the Set, and the Dedicate have integrated LEDs with built-in dimmers (either inline on the cord or on the lamp body itself). The E27 ships with a dimmable LED bulb and can be paired with a wall or in-line dimmer. The Strand and Ambit Pendant ship without bulbs, so dimming depends on the bulb you choose. Check the product page for each model before ordering if dimming is critical.
How do I choose between the Strand Open and Strand Closed?
The Closed version is the cleaner sculptural form. It pushes light outward through the cocoon walls and reads as a soft hovering cloud. The Open version has exposed top and bottom apertures that release direct light up and down, paired with the diffused glow from the walls. Choose Closed for ambient soft light, Open if you want a brighter, more functional pendant over a dining table or kitchen island.
Who designs Muuto's lighting?
Muuto does not have an in-house design team. Instead, the brand commissions independent designers from across Europe, the UK, and North America. The five lamps in this post represent five different studios: Benjamin Hubert (London), Broberg and Ridderstrale (Stockholm), TAF Studio (Stockholm, two pieces), and Jamie Wolfond (Toronto). Other notable contributors to the lighting collection include Thomas Bentzen and Form Us With Love.
What does the name Muuto mean?
Muuto is derived from the Finnish word muutos, which translates roughly as new perspective or change. The brand has used the phrase "new perspectives on Scandinavian design" as its operating principle since founding, which is also why their lighting program leans on commissioned designers from outside Denmark.
What ties these five lamps together is not a shared silhouette or a recognizable house style. It is the brief Muuto gives each designer: bring a fresh perspective to an ordinary object. Benjamin Hubert reapplied a marine-industrial coating process to a pendant shade. Broberg and Ridderstrale built a floor lamp whose silhouette changes as you walk past it. TAF Studio drew on bike-frame geometry to refine a wall sconce. Jamie Wolfond made the screw thread itself the mechanism. Mattias Stahlbom pared a pendant back to the socket and the bulb. The work looks different from designer to designer, but the spirit of the brief carries through all of it.
If you are working through a room and want help thinking about how one of these pieces fits into the broader layout, our in-house design team works with clients across Canada on everything from a single-room refresh to full furniture and lighting plans.
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