Originally from Stuttgart, Germany, Volker Haug moved to Australia in the early 2000s and ended up working under the celebrated lighting designer Geoffrey Mance in Melbourne. In 2004, Haug departed to launch his own studio out of his garage, which has since grown to 19 employees. As the team has expanded, he has increasingly found that there’s magic in the mix, assembling a diverse group of international makers with a wide variety of skill sets. “A few members of the team aren’t Australian born and haven’t lived in Australia all their lives, which brings quite a lot of perspective to what we do,” he tells Business of Home. “There are industrial designers on the team, but there are also jewelers, interior designers, artists, and even a linguist.”
All of Haug’s eponymous studio’s pieces are born out of collaboration, with the whole team working together out of a converted 1940s warehouse to come up with concepts, choose materials, and create custom pieces for clients. “Having the design and production team under the same roof offers a great opportunity to refine our ideas before presenting them to our manufacturing partners,” he says. The studio has long-standing relationships with all of the local fabricators—some have been working with Haug for nearly 25 years.
The design process varies from collection to collection. For the Und Messing line, whic was designed and produced during Covid, the lack of raw materials available at the time affected the design. “If you look closer into the collection, you can see various different designs that don’t seem to work together, but they harmonize in their materiality and manufacturing processes,” says Haug. The brand’s latest collection, Me and You, made in collaboration with the Australian interior design studio Flack Studio, came about because designer David Flack needed to replace a vintage light that arrived damaged for a project. After working together on that project, the two developed a collection that grew to 12 pieces. One of those pieces is the Tux lamp, with a base made of glass and brass and a lampshade crafted in fiberglass.
Haug’s personal favorite is the OMG light. Stretching about 6 feet in diameter and offered as a pendant or wall-mounted fixture, it is a patchwork of 19 individual, reclaimed industrial shades that are flattened, anodized in different colors, and affixed to each other. “I was given a truckful of industrial light shades and told to make something with them, so I did,” he says. “The invitation to produce something with what I had in front of me ended up being the inspiration for this piece. It is big, colorful and loud.”
The studio has presented new collections during Milan Design Week four times over the past six years, and recently made the decision to participate every two years. “Milan is a great platform to showcase new products, connect with our international audience, and see familiar faces but also meet new ones,” says Haug. “Presenting new work allows for further opportunity to come home, evaluate the feedback, and incorporate it into new products or iterations of existing ones.” For example, after the furniture fair’s attendees raved about its Tux lamp, the studio began developing more products based on that piece’s design language and materials. The Bruce wall light is another popular product the brand showed last April in Milan that is now expanding into new materials and sizes. The studio hopes to continue interacting with a global audience and creating partnerships in the U.S., Europe, Asia and beyond.
Next year, Volker Haug Studio will celebrate its 20-year anniversary, and Haug hopes the environment of collaboration will continue to grow. “Some of my colleagues have been with the studio for over a decade. It has been great to see them grow individually and together. We have achieved and celebrated many milestones together with lots more to come,” he says. “The spirit and creativity that I started with has always remained and been a strong part of the studio’s identity and philosophy.”
For more information on Volker Haug, visit its website or Instagram.
