Showroom

Vaughan Designs

Trade account to buy

Decorative lighting, furniture, and accessories since 1983, founded by Lucy and Michael Vaughan.

Vaughan is a British lighting house with a suite in the New York Design Center at 200 Lexington Avenue. The building is open to the public and this showroom sells to the trade. Lucy and Michael Vaughan founded it in 1983, and it began as an antiques business before becoming a maker.

The lamps, lanterns, sconces and chandeliers are drawn from antique originals rather than styled to look old, and they are made, assembled or finished in Britain using traditional methods. The difference shows in the details a reproduction usually gets wrong, the proportion of a bell jar, the depth of a lacquer, the weight of a cast arm.

What that buys on a project is a fitting that will sit in a period room without announcing itself as new, and in a modern room without reading as pastiche. Vaughan is the house designers reach for when a room needs light that does not date the scheme in either direction.

Vaughan makes to the base rather than offering one shade per lamp, and the same lamp reads completely differently under a card shade and a silk one.

Settle the wiring before the lamp. British fittings need American wiring and the switch position, cord colour and plug type are all specifiable at order and expensive to change afterwards. Ask for the electrical specification at the same time as the finish, because a beautiful lamp with the wrong cord running down a pale wall is what gets noticed.