Walk the floor with Enrico Maria Masiero, the second generation of the family that founded it, and he'll tell you the story without much ceremony. In the late 1990s, this was a volume business, turning out lighting by the hundreds of pieces a day for big retail chains in Germany and America. Then the buyers found China, and the orders collapsed in a matter of months.
The Veneto is dotted with the remains of companies that didn't find an answer to that. Masiero's answer was to stop competing on volume entirely and rebuild the firm around the two things that couldn't be shipped offshore: the manufacturing skill on its own factory floor, and the willingness to make exactly what a customer asks for.
A Family Firm in the Venetian Tradition
The company was founded in 1981 by Marilena Pellizzato and Paolo Masiero, trading originally as Emme Pi Light, and the family name went on the door when the second generation joined the business. The location was no accident. The Veneto is the historic heartland of decorative lighting, shaped by centuries of Venetian glassmaking and the grand chandeliers of the city's palazzi, and that inheritance still runs through everything the company makes.
What changed after the pivot is how deep the workshop goes. Iron, stainless steel, copper and solid brass are cut, formed and welded in-house. Powder coating is done on site. Gold, silver and copper leaf are applied by hand, with sprayed tones layered over the top where a finish calls for it. Even the lampshades are made in the building, frame and fabric both, a capability the company brought in-house after outside suppliers proved unreliable on colour and delivery. It means a client can send a length of their own curtain or upholstery fabric and have it wrapped onto the shade of their chandelier.
That last detail is the whole philosophy in miniature. Because the people who design a piece work a corridor away from the people who build it, adapting a fitting to a particular ceiling height, finish or fabric is a conversation rather than a negotiation. For interior designers, this matters more than almost anything else a manufacturer can offer.
The range is organised into two principal catalogues. Dimore covers the decorative collections for the home. Atelier is where the more experimental work lives, the designer collaborations and the pieces built for double-height stairwells and hotel lobbies.
The Designers and the Work
Masiero's modern identity has been built through collaboration. The company briefs external designers, then develops their ideas alongside its own research and development team, and the results have produced some of the most recognisable pieces in contemporary decorative lighting.
Horo, by the French designer Pierre Gonalons, is the clearest example. A disc of glass held in a slim metal frame, it takes the circle as its starting point and refuses to complicate it. The glass is decorative but restrained, the proportions exact, and the whole piece carries a quiet echo of Italian design of the 1950s. It won the Good Design Award in 2021, and it is easy to see why: it photographs simply and lives generously, throwing a soft, even glow that flatters a room rather than dominating it.
Horo. Courtesy of Masiero
Nappe, by the Venetian designer Marco Zito, works the local inheritance differently. It takes the 'nappine', the tassels that ornament the grand rooms of Venetian stately homes, and rebuilds them as suspended forms with slender rods and glass diffusers. The result reads as contemporary at first glance and deeply Venetian at the second, which is the trick Masiero pulls off more often than most.
Then there is Vegas, by Marc Sadler, where thick glass is deliberately deformed under heat so that each strip emerges similar to its neighbours but never identical, trapping small air bubbles the way the old master glassmakers did. It is an industrial process arranged to produce the irregularity of the hand, and it gives each fitting a character of its own.
Across all of it, the constant is how the light behaves. Masiero pieces tend to diffuse rather than dazzle. Glass is chosen for how it softens a source, metal for how it frames one. These are fittings designed to be lived under, not just looked at.
Available through Caspen. We hold a curated selection of Masiero's work, from chandeliers and pendants to wall lights, each piece made at Casale sul Sile. Explore the Masiero collection.
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