Unboring Projects: LightForm’s New Vancouver Showroom by Little Giant Studio
August 25, 2026
LightForm’s New Vancouver Showroom: A Showroom Designed to Make You Fall in Love with Light Again
The best collaborations rarely start with a project brief. Sometimes seedlings of ideas sprout years earlier through conversations, co-creating and working together, shared values, and mutual respect between people who have spent decades shaping the same industry. That was the exact foundation that led to LightForm’s Vancouver showroom.
Created in close collaboration with LightForm founder Richard Assaly, the Vancouver showroom was designed by Little Giant Studio, an architecture and interiors practice known for thoughtful, experience-driven spaces. It grew from a long-standing relationship between two teams that have evolved alongside one another as friends, collaborators, industry colleagues, and each other’s trusted clients.
The convergence of roles and interpersonal history between the two companies made this project unique. Little Giant was not only designing a showroom for a client, but they were also creating a space they would continue to use themselves.
“It was a very collaborative process,” the Little Giant team explains. “We were the designers, but we were also the end users.”
From the outset, the vision was clear. That shared perspective is evident in every design decision.
A Reaction Against the Expected
Instead of asking how many products could fit into the showroom, Little Giant reframed the approach by asking a different question: How should a lighting showroom make people feel?
“The showroom was a reaction against the typical lighting showroom,” the team says. “You lose the romance of lighting.”
Instead of bright, neutral spaces packed with fixtures, the design embraces restraint. Little Giant understands that showcasing light requires more drama than simply showing what a fixture looks like, and this distinction became central to the project. Products are edited rather than maximized. Using heavy drapery to deliberately conceal and reveal creates moments of discovery. Plaster walls, textured fabrics, and rich materials become canvases that reveal how light behaves, travels, and bounces.
Close-up detail of leather wrapped around a pillar.
We see lights as having two components. One is the form of the fixture itself. The other is how the light is cast against surfaces.”
Rather than presenting lighting in isolation, the showroom invites visitors to experience the dialogue between object, material, shadow, and atmosphere. Both LightForm and Little Giant know very well that the devil is in the details.
Designing for Discovery
Walking into a conventional lighting showroom can often feel overwhelming. Rows upon rows of products compete for attention, leaving designers and specifiers with choice paralysis.
Hence, Little Giant intentionally moved in the opposite direction:
“People are inundated with so much data. Making designers’ jobs a little easier and a little less overwhelming was a big driver.”
Editing became one of the project’s most important design tools. Fixtures were carefully curated instead of densely displayed. Some are intentionally hidden so others can take centre stage. Drapery softens transitions between spaces, while intimate vignettes encourage visitors to slow down, wander, engage, and discover. Instead of selling products, the showroom evokes feelings and tells stories.
The Paradox of Lighting a Lighting Showroom
One of the project’s greatest challenges was surprisingly philosophical: How do you light a lighting showroom without making it feel over-lit?
With hundreds of fixtures on display and daylight pouring in through expansive windows, creating atmosphere became an exercise in subtraction. Heavy drapery absorbs excess light. Darker palettes add depth and increase contrast. Carefully edited displays allow individual fixtures to glow without competing against one another.
Dew Drops Wall/Ceiling Lights by Bomma, next to more lights concealed in sample wardrobes that can be hidden.
“The challenge was making the space feel atmospheric, bright enough to do your job, while still allowing each light to individually glow.”
It’s a solution visitors rarely notice consciously, but it’s a detail almost everyone feels.
Built on Trust
The project was made easier by something that can’t be specified on a drawing set, and that was trust. The relationship between Little Giant and LightForm stretches back decades, evolving through years of friendship, shared projects, and a mutual appreciation for thoughtful design. That familiarity allowed conversations to begin at a deeper level.
“It felt very natural,” the team reflects. “There was a lot of trust.”
Knotty Bubbles by Roll & Hill, Sylvestrina Portable Lamp by Santa & Cole, La Lampe B by DCW Editions, and Mantle Portable Lamp by Tala.
That trust extended beyond aesthetics. The designers knew LightForm’s product knowledge and curatorial eye would elevate the finished space. They saw LightForm not just as a supplier of lights, but as an extension of their own practice.
“To me, LightForm is an extension of Little Giant. If we can’t meet a client there ourselves, we know they’ll be taken care of because they share the same values.”
It’s a rare kind of partnership, built through years of working alongside one another as colleagues in the design community.
For Little Giant, success was never measured by how many fixtures fit inside the space, but by what visitors felt after walking through the door.
“We wanted people to forget about the world when they walk in,” the team says. “We wanted people to feel transformed. We wanted them to feel that they’re now in the LightForm experience.”
Early reactions suggest they’ve achieved exactly that. Members of the design community have described the showroom as one of the finest in the country, while many visitors linger longer than they expected, discovering products organically instead of rushing from display to display.
That approach has since been recognized by the industry. For 2026, the LightForm Vancouver showroom received a Canadian Interiors Best of Canada Award in the Retail category, honouring a project that reimagines what a lighting showroom can be.
In an industry often defined by specifications and product counts, the Vancouver showroom reminds us that lighting has always been about something more. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, lighting is ethereal. It influences how people feel in a space, and shapes how individuals experience it.
For more information on LightForm lighting solutions HERE
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