FEATURE
Mock Studio
Collection
Dot Lighting
Type
Highlight
Contact
Mock Studio launched their first lighting pieces this fall, and they reveal a studio deeply invested in how proportion, materiality, and human experience connect. The Dot Light Plate and Dot Light Stick feature hand-brushed aluminum punctuated by resin-filled circles that glow when lit, designed to work in multiple orientations: mounted, leaned, suspended, or laid flat.
Brooklyn-based duo Christian Kotzamanis and Masha Osorio operate from a workshop that doubles as fabrication facility, allowing them to move between designing restaurant interiors and creating standalone objects. The distinction matters to them. Objects offer pure expression without external agendas, while spatial work navigates client needs and architectural constraints. Both inform each other, creating an interconnected practice where ideas translate across scales.
The grid structure defines these lights, part of an ongoing exploration into repetition and visual patterns. For Mock Studio, grids aren’t about constraint but clarity, a way of making things understandable rather than mystifying. They describe searching for poetry in the profane, in everyday and overlooked materials. The resin dots treat color as inseparable from material, shifting throughout the day as light and shadow change.
The versatility here feels genuinely different from the usual claims of flexible design. These lights shift between architectural element and sculptural object simply through how you position them, no additional hardware or mechanisms required. Mock Studio produces them as limited editions of 10 via pre-order, a fashion-industry model that ensures nothing gets made without a home already waiting. It’s a model that aligns with everything else about their practice: searching for profound simplicity, respecting materials, doing only what’s necessary to reveal potential.
Mock Studio operates across architecture, interiors, and now lighting, all from your Brooklyn workshop. How does having fabrication capabilities in-house change the way you approach designing a restaurant like the Greenpoint project versus creating a product like the Dot Lights?
Having fabrication capabilities in-house gives us a lot of agility. It lets us experiment, prototype, and problem-solve quickly. And from a client perspective, it adds a lot of clarity early on in the process. Because we’re able to draw on hands-on experience, we can intuitively guide conversations about what’s feasible from the early planning phase, which makes the whole design journey smoother and more rewarding. We are a client-oriented studio, most of our work is commision-based and therefore we put a lot of emphasis on understanding our client.
However we often look for opportunities to develop objects that are self-commissioned or where we ourselves are our own client. There’s also an important distinction in terms of process between creating interiors and creating objects. When we design an object, it’s driven entirely by us, it can be free of external agendas and closer to pure expression. An interior, on the other hand, is influenced by a much more complex set of parameters, from client needs to architectural constraints, and of course our own design intentions. Both are rewarding in different ways.
You’ve mentioned an interest in exploring grids as visual structures and themes of repetition. What draws you to these formal constraints, and how do they open up creative possibilities rather than limit them?
The allure of the grid is something we honestly can’t fully rationalize, there is something inherently compelling about it. In a way the grid is always present in design, whether you choose to follow it strictly or intentionally move away from it. Even the simple act of measuring introduces a kind of grid, so it’s this constant, underlying structure that quietly shapes the work.
For us, the grid isn’t just a tool for measurement; it represents a desire for clarity. It’s a way of expressing truth rather than obscuring it, of making things understandable rather than mystifying and there’s something very grounding about that.
At the same time, we’re searching for poetry in the profane, in the everyday, the overlooked, the mundane. That balance between structure and subtle beauty is something we naturally gravitate toward in our work.
You launched Mock Yellow in 2023, which became butter yellow’s widespread moment last season. Now you’re working with colorful resin dots in aluminum. How do you think about color as a tool in your work, especially when balancing restraint with moments of vibrancy?
We rarely think of color as something separate from material. Take butter yellow, for example, what makes it compelling isn’t just the color itself, but how it behaves when applied to a translucent material.. We’re interested in how it interacts with light and shadow, how it shifts throughout the day, and even how it might feel to the touch. Color becomes much richer when it’s experienced through the qualities of a material rather than as a pantone.
Our interest in materiality, much like our fascination with the grid, really comes from a search for profound simplicity. We try not to overprocess either our materials or our ideas. Instead, we let the inherent qualities of each material speak for themselves and exist in their most raw and unedited form.
That doesn’t mean we only work with natural materials. In fact, we love working with industrial and synthetic materials just as much. What matters to us is how honestly the material can express itself. We’re always looking for ways to do the least amount of intervention, just enough to reveal the potential of the material without overwhelming it. That restraint is an important part of our design philosophy.
Your pre-order model and limited editions of 10 represent a deliberate break from traditional product distribution. What led you to adopt this fashion-industry approach for lighting design, and how does it align with your studio’s values around waste and overproduction?
We adopted a pre-order and limited-edition model because it lets us make things in a more intentional way. We’ve been really inspired by the idea of slow production, where you create fewer, more considered pieces at a thoughtful, steady pace. It aligns with how we want to work: designing carefully, sourcing responsibly, and not putting more objects into the world than there needs to be.
For us, it’s not about creating scarcity. It’s simply about respecting our time, our materials, and the realities of being a small studio. Pre-orders help us understand real demand so that every piece we make already has a home. It lets people who truly connect with the work purchase it, and it helps us avoid waste, manage resources in a smarter way, and keep the craft at the center of what we do.
[Photos by Chelsie Craig]
