5 Visionary Studios Who Are Literally Changing How We See the World

The Licht Project
Location: Pune
Website: https://thelichtproject.com/
Principal: Kshanottaraa Balhar & Rahul Mukesh

There is a line that The Licht Project returns to again and again, ‘light is the last layer of a space, and the first thing you feel’. It sounds like a paradox, but spend time with their work, and it begins to make perfect sense. The Pune-based studio, founded in 2021, treats illumination not as an afterthought but as the architecture itself, intentional in every beam, every shadow, every deliberate absence of both.

In just five years, the studio has designed over 200 spaces across more than ten cities, including some of India’s most recognisable homes among its portfolio. Their philosophy is built on a careful balance: they know when a space needs structure, and when it needs soul. Underpinning the work is a network of over 80 international brands, each selected strictly for performance and design integrity. Beyond the projects, The Licht Project has extended its thinking into the cultural sphere; their curated design soirée, Lumina, brought architects, designers, and industry voices together to explore light as pure experience and became one of the most talked-about evenings in recent design memory.

Lamtain Lamps
Location: Kochi
Website: https://www.instagram.com/lamtain_official?igsh=Yjl1azg1NGdpOWt0
Principal: Ar. Thameel Saifudhin

Most design studios are built on vision; Lamtain is built on truth. Founded in 1989 by Saifudhin, described by those who knew him as an original thinker and a natural designer, the practice was shaped from its earliest days by a commitment to genuine craft, working alongside skilled local artisans to make objects that earned their place in a room. Today, his son Thameel Saifudhin carries that legacy forward, and the philosophy remains unchanged: design for truth, create with intent.

At Lamtain, a lamp is never simply a lamp. Every product carries what the studio calls a narrative responsibility, something it stands for beyond what it does. The integrity of any piece, they believe, lies in how truthfully it performs its purpose. It is a quietly radical idea in an era of decorative excess; that illumination, at its best, is a moral act as much as an aesthetic one.

Love of Light
Location: Secunderabad, Telangana
Website: https://www.loveoflight.in/
Principal: Dashak Agarwal

The name says everything and nothing at once. Love of Light is an award-winning architectural lighting design practice built on a conviction most people never consciously encounter, that the best light is the light you don’t notice. Most people notice a beautiful space, rarely pausing to credit the illumination that makes it so. That invisibility, hard-won, meticulously engineered, is precisely what Love of Light designs for.

Working across interiors, facades, and landscapes from their India base, the practice treats light as architecture’s most powerful and most underestimated tool. The wider world has begun to agree. Love of Light took home the LIT Lighting Design Award 2025, one of the most prestigious honors in the field, from over 1,000 entries across 62 countries. They were also shortlisted at the DARC Awards, the only peer-to-peer lighting prize in existence, judged solely by fellow designers. Between them, the recognitions place the studio firmly among the practices shaping the future of light globally.

The Little Dipper Lighting Design
Location: Bangalore
Website: https://www.thelittledipper.in/
Principal: Rhea Goyal & Sharath Nittur

Named for the constellation that has guided navigators for centuries, The Little Dipper operates on a similar principle of the most powerful light being the kind that orients you without announcing itself. Founded in 2021 by Rhea Goyal and Sharath Nittur, the studio was built one project at a time, with each commission deepening its understanding of the craft.

The pairing of its founders is deliberate and complementary. Goyal, an architect by training, shapes the creative and narrative vision. Nittur’s engineering background ensures that what is imagined can be executed with precision. Together, they have taken the practice across an unusually wide range of typologies, from institutional campuses and heritage restorations to hospitality spaces and crafted residences. The ambition across all of them is consistent: to craft light that feels, as the studio puts it, a little enchanting, a little enriching, a little mesmerising. Like the constellation itself, quietly indispensable.

What unites these studios, separated by geography, scale, and approach, is a shared refusal to treat light as decoration. For each of them, it is something closer to a language; precise, expressive, and capable of saying things about a space that no other element can. As Indian design continues to find its footing on the world stage, it is worth paying attention to the people working not with what we see, but with what allows us to see at all. The best rooms, they would each tell you, are not remembered for how they looked. They are remembered for how they felt. And that, quietly, is the whole point.