There’s a particular energy that settles over Milan every April, and again over Copenhagen each June, when the world’s lighting brands unveil what’s next. For most of the industry, that energy filters slowly into showrooms and spec sheets over the following months. This past June, Greg Kay, founder of Lightology, wanted to shortcut that timeline.
The result was The Unveiling: A Design Fair Edit, an installation inside Lightology’s flagship showroom just steps from THE MART, giving Chicago’s design community first access to some of the season’s most anticipated introductions from Flos, Foscarini, Lodes, Louis Poulsen, Luceplan, and Moooi.
For Greg, the project asked something new of a space that had spent nearly a quarter century as a lighting destination.
Founder Greg Kay has spent nearly a quarter century building Lightology’s reputation as a place to encounter lighting from around the world, well before The Unveiling made that mission explicit.
“We really transformed the showroom into a destination for discovery,” he says. “It became an immersive exhibition that captures the excitement of international design.”
The installation’s debut was no accident of scheduling. It opened during NeoCon, when designers descend on Chicago actively sourcing product. It was a moment, Greg says, built for exactly this kind of introduction, a chance to put the latest global launches directly in front of the people who would end up specifying them into real projects. Lightology had also positioned itself since its founding as a place to encounter exceptional lighting from around the world, and this installation made that explicit, turning the showroom, if only for a stretch, into an extension of the international design calendar itself.
The timing also lined up with Lightology’s own NeoCon kickoff, A Toast to Design: Celebrating Craft & Innovation with PureEdge Lighting, which paired the international debuts with PureEdge Lighting’s American-made architectural fixtures, including several designs of Greg’s own.
“It allowed us to present a more complete vision of lighting design,” he says. “It brought together decorative inspiration and architectural innovation, while highlighting the craftsmanship, performance, and accessibility that American manufacturing can offer a project.”
When I visited the showroom during NeoCon, Greg walked me through it room by room, and “funhouse” is the word that kept coming to mind. Each turn opened onto something different: a wall of pendants clustered like a constellation in one room, a single sculptural floor lamp given its own spotlit alcove in the next, a cluster of table lamps arranged like a still life on a plinth. Nothing repeated itself, and nothing sat still long enough to blend into the background. Greg moved through the space the way someone shows off a collection they love, stopping to point out every joint, finish, and shade angle.
Across the showroom, principal collections from various brands made the case for where the category is headed. What tied them together wasn’t a shared material or silhouette, but a shared premise of discovery. Several pieces had arrived in Chicago fresh off the floors of Salone del Mobile and 3daysofdesign.
“The response was incredibly enthusiastic,” Greg says. “Designers were excited to experience these new introductions in person, especially pieces they had recently seen coming out of Milan and Copenhagen, or hadn’t yet encountered at all.”
Most conversations, he says, gravitated toward specifics: what a piece was made of, how its technology worked, or where it might fit into a project already on the board. And inevitably, the question that follows any good discovery: “How soon can I get my hands on this?”
