Lukas Peet

With an approach that synthesizes pragmatism and whimsy, Lukas Peet’s designs reconsider the complexities of lighting and how it fills a space.

- Jennifer Van Evra

Growing up in Canmore, Alberta, a rugged mountain town in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, designer Lukas Peet saw that in the natural world, design isn’t a luxury: It’s a matter of survival.

“The climate is very extreme, and everything has to struggle to be there,” says Peet. On a trip to the nearby Columbia Icefield, he saw 300-year-old trees that were barely a few feet tall and had branches only on one side—an adaptation that allowed them to endure the area’s extreme wind and ice. “In a design sense, everything is refined to the smallest increment.”

Now based in Vancouver’s trendy (and far more temperate) Railtown neighborhood, Peet brings the same rigor and pragmatism to his own designs, whether they’re carefully considered LED fixtures for his lighting company ANDlight, unified lighting and racking systems for retail interiors, or 3D-printed product prototypes for his own studio, Lukas/Peet Design. Anything nonessential gets stripped away, leaving work that at first blush can seem deceptively simple—but reveals its understated complexity on closer inspection.