Flos

About

Flos is an Italian lighting manufacturer founded in Merano, in northern Italy, in 1962. The company was established by Dino Gavina and Cesare Cassina, in collaboration with Arturo Eisenkeil, a Merano-based businessman who had been importing an innovative coating material from the United States. The name "Flos" is the Latin word for "flower." The founders set out to apply contemporary design thinking to household lighting, and they engaged the brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni as the company's first designers. Production and the company's headquarters subsequently moved to the Brescia area of Lombardy, where Flos S.p.A. is today registered in Bovezzo. From its early years, Flos built a catalogue around collaborations with prominent Italian designers and architects. The Castiglioni brothers produced several designs in 1962 that remain in production, including the Arco floor lamp and the Taccia table lamp. The Arco lamp, a long arching stainless-steel arm rising from a Carrara marble base, was conceived to provide overhead light without a ceiling fixture and was reportedly inspired by a streetlight. The Taccia table lamp pairs a glass diffuser with an adjustable aluminium reflector to cast indirect light. These early design lamps helped establish the company's identity around the intersection of industrial design and domestic lighting. Flos expanded its catalogue through further designer partnerships and acquisitions. In 1971 Achille Castiglioni and Pio Manzù designed the Parentesi, a height-adjustable lamp that slides along a tensioned steel wire stretched between floor and ceiling; it received the Compasso d'Oro award in 1979. The Castiglioni brothers also designed the Snoopy table lamp, with its domed enamelled-metal shade and marble base. In 1973 Flos acquired Arteluce, the lighting firm founded in 1939 by Gino Sarfatti, and continues to produce Sarfatti designs such as the 2097 chandelier, originally created in 1958, which arranges exposed bulbs on slender radiating arms with the wiring left visible. More recently, the designer Michael Anastassiades created the IC Lights series, introduced in 2014, in which opal glass spheres are balanced on slim metal stems. Over the decades Flos has worked with a broad roster of international designers, including Philippe Starck, Konstantin Grcic, Patricia Urquiola, Jasper Morrison, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Marcel Wanders, Antonio Citterio and Michael Anastassiades. The catalogue spans decorative and architectural lighting, ranging from table, floor, wall, ceiling and pendant lamps for the home to recessed and track systems and outdoor fixtures intended for professional and architectural applications. Several Flos products are held in the design collections of museums, and a number have received design awards including the Compasso d'Oro. Today Flos operates as part of the Flos B&B Italia Group, a high-end design group formed in 2018 as Design Holding and renamed Flos B&B Italia Group in 2024. The group brings together a portfolio of furniture and lighting brands that includes B&B Italia, Maxalto, Arclinea, Azucena and Louis Poulsen, and it is jointly owned by the investment firms Investindustrial and The Carlyle Group. The group reports manufacturing operations in Italy and abroad, with principal industrial activity concentrated in Lombardy. The company addresses several markets. Its residential range covers decorative lighting for the home, while a professional or architectural division supplies lighting systems for contract, commercial and architectural projects, including hospitality and retail environments. Flos products are distributed internationally through company-operated stores, regional online stores on the flos.com domain, authorised retailers and specification channels serving architects and interior designers. Flos's catalogue today combines long-running classics with newer collections. Many of its best-known designs, such as the Arco lamp, the Parentesi, the Snoopy and the 2097 chandelier, continue to be manufactured alongside contemporary work, and the company is frequently cited in surveys of twentieth-century Italian lighting and industrial design.