Founded in 1962 in Bovezzo, Italy, FLOS has grown from a workshop devoted to Achille Castiglioni and Pier Giacomo's experimental fixtures into a global house of designer architectural lighting working with Philippe Starck, Patricia Urquiola, Konstantin Grcic, Marcel Wanders, Jasper Morrison and Michael Anastassiades. Each collection — from the iconic Arco floor lamp and Taccia table light to the Soft Architecture wall systems and FLOS Architectural Compass Box — is engineered in our Brescia plants and specified into museums, hotels, flagship retail and luxury residences across more than ninety countries.
Dino Gavina and Cesare Cassina founded FLOS in 1962 to industrialise the radical prototypes Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni were sketching in Milan — most famously the Arco, whose marble base and arching steel stem still anchor every conversation about Italian lighting design. Six decades later that same drawing-board spirit guides how we collaborate with architects, contract specifiers and curators on each new family.
Every FLOS collection begins with a named designer brief — Castiglioni's Toio and Taccia, Starck's Romeo Moon and Miss K, Grcic's May Day, Urquiola's Skygarden, Anastassiades' IC Lights and String. We protect that authorship through CAD-controlled tooling and signed editions so specifiers can quote provenance to their clients with confidence.
Mouth-blown opaline glass from Veneto glassworks, hand-finished brass turning, anodised aluminium extrusion and Brianza upholstery converge at our Bovezzo and Brescia facilities. The same craftsmen tune diffuser thickness on a Skygarden pendant and assemble heat-managed driver bays for FLOS Architectural luminaires.
The FLOS Architectural division — born from the Antares and Quasar acquisitions — produces Compass Box, The Running Magnet 2, Find Me, Easy Kap and Belvedere families dedicated to museum, retail and hospitality specification, with photometric files, CRI 95 options and fully detailed installation drawings released through our specifier portal.
Each April at Salone del Mobile we present new editions in our via Angelo Faini showroom and Brera flagship, hosted alongside designer previews with the studios of Urquiola, Anastassiades and Formafantasma. Visiting architects can review prototypes, request photometry and lock specification packages before mass production.
FLOS treats lighting as a piece of architecture rather than an accessory. The values below shape how we evaluate a fixture brief — whether it is a Captain Flint floor lamp for a private residence or a kilometre of The Running Magnet track for a luxury department store.
We refuse the shortcut of stylistic copying. Each new family must answer a structural question — Aim's freely positioned suspension cable, IC Lights' precarious balance, Bellhop's rechargeable simplicity — and earn its place beside the Castiglioni archive before it ships.
Photometric data, CRI, R9, MacAdam binning, flicker percentages and DALI-2 / Casambi compatibility are published openly. Architectural lighting designers receive IES files, BIM objects and dimming curves on request, with no marketing-language padding around the numbers.
Glass diffusers, drivers and LED engines on flagship families such as Arco, Taccia and 2097 are stocked as service parts for the lifetime of the collection. A 1970s Toio rewired in our Bovezzo workshop will leave with the same finish quality as a current production unit.
Outdoor luminaires Camp, Belvedere, Bilboquet and Casting C carry IP65 ratings, dark-sky-aware optics and powder-coated marine-grade finishes so coastal hotels, public squares and museum gardens remain unaffected by the project years after handover.
Designer lighting carries a cultural responsibility. We invest into the institutions that train the next generation of lighting designers, the museums that protect twentieth-century design history, and the public spaces that benefit from disciplined night-time illumination.
Triennale Milano, M+ Hong Kong and Pinacoteca Agnelli have specified FLOS Architectural track and recessed luminaires for permanent collections. Our museum team co-develops low-UV, tunable-white solutions with conservators to keep paintings and textiles safe at the agreed lux levels.
Through the Achille Castiglioni Foundation and partnerships with NABA, Domus Academy and Politecnico di Milano, FLOS hosts workshops where students reverse-engineer a single archive lamp — usually the Parentesi — to learn how mechanism, material and light source resolve into one product.
The Casting C bollard and In Vitro outdoor family illuminate Italian piazzas, Spanish historic centres and Japanese hotel courtyards under brief from architects including Vincent Van Duysen and Piero Lissoni. Each install respects local night-sky rules and is documented for municipal handover.
Bovezzo and Brescia plants run on certified renewable electricity. Circular service contracts let owners of legacy Splügen Bräu, Frisbi and Skygarden fixtures swap depleted LED engines for current-generation modules without replacing the visible luminaire.
Send your floorplans, ceiling-mount conditions, control protocol and Salone-aligned lead-time targets. A FLOS specification consultant — paired with the Architectural division when needed — will return photometry, finish samples and a coordinated quotation.
Share fixture type, site conditions, target schedule, and any controls requirements. Our team will route the request to the right specialist.