Most lighting has a dirty secret: it only works half the day. Flip the switch and a pendant or sconce can look spectacular, all warm glow and dramatic shadow. Flip it off, and you’re left staring at what is often just a glorified fixture, a thing bolted to a ceiling that has nothing to say for itself once the bulb goes dark. That gap between “on” and “off” is where a lot of home lighting quietly fails us, and it’s a problem most people never think to name because they’ve simply accepted it.
Hollis+Morris, the Toronto studio behind the new Beaufort collection, clearly has thought about it. Their solution isn’t a smarter bulb or a clever dimmer app. It’s a rethinking of what a light fixture is supposed to do when it’s doing nothing at all. Beaufort is built from sculpted solid wood paired with sandblasted acrylic, and the acrylic is cut and finished so it holds a kind of frozen depth, layered, translucent, a little mysterious, whether or not there’s current running through it. Turn it on and light diffuses through those layers in soft gradients. Turn it off and you still have an object worth walking past twice.
Designer: Hollis+Morris
The origin story is the kind of thing that sounds almost too tidy, except it happens to be true. Mischa Couvrette, the studio’s founder and lead designer, was flying home from Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign when a conversation about ice, and about climate change, turned into sketches on a cocktail napkin somewhere over the Atlantic. By the time the plane landed, the collection basically existed in his head. The name comes from the Beaufort Sea, that remote stretch of Arctic water above Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories, which is a fitting reference for a studio that has built its identity on restraint rather than spectacle.
I appreciate that the collection doesn’t try to literally recreate an iceberg hanging from your ceiling. Instead it borrows the logic of ice: how light moves through something dense and layered, how clarity shifts depending on where you’re standing. The studio achieves that through repetition, mirroring, and rotation of a small set of core components, which is a fancy way of saying they’ve built one coherent visual language and then let it flex across a sconce, a mirrored horizontal pendant, a lantern-like vertical pendant, and a table lamp. Nothing in the lineup feels like an afterthought tacked onto a single hero piece just to pad out a catalog.
Jonathan Mandeville of Hollis+Morris put it plainly when he said the collection sits in a lineage of Scandinavian and Canadian design that values material honesty and quiet restraint, the idea that an object should earn its keep even when it isn’t doing anything. That’s a bit of a jab, gentle as it is, at a design moment that has leaned hard into maximalism and novelty for novelty’s sake. I don’t think Beaufort is arguing that bold, loud design is wrong. Plenty of homes need a little chaos. But there’s real value in a piece that doesn’t ask for your attention so much as reward it once you’ve already given it, and that’s a harder trick to pull off than another oversized statement chandelier.
It also matters, at least to me, that these pieces are made in Canada by a B Corp certified studio that treats that fact as a working value rather than a sticker on the box. Knowing who made a light and how isn’t a small thing anymore, especially with home goods, where supply chains can be murky at best.
Beaufort isn’t cheap. The R5 horizontal pendant runs $3,800 and the M2 horizontal starts around $1,900, so this is squarely in investment-piece territory, not an impulse buy from a big box store. But for anyone who has ever bought a light fixture, loved it while it was on, and felt a little let down by it during the day, Beaufort makes a fairly convincing case that the two states shouldn’t have to be so different.
