Rick Tegelaar designs through making — mesh and woven LEDs become Moooi and LVMH lights

Rick Tegelaar's route into design was hands-on: after his father died when he was 16, he chose vocational metalworking school over an academic path, learning lathes, milling and welding, and later switched to industrial design at ArtEZ. His process runs opposite to convention — instead of sketching what something should look like and then building it, he starts with materials and lets making find the form.

Wire mesh, he says, is a material with no meaning within the design context, and shaping it controllably is the hard part. Tegelaar built a custom machine and specialized tools, and discovered that stretching mesh over a mould rather than pressing it produced elegant, rhythmic forms capable of emitting ambient light. The self-produced Meshmatics series earned enough to sustain his studio and caught Moooi's attention at Downtown Design Dubai in 2016, becoming his second product manufactured and distributed by the brand.

Handing production to Moooi removed the daily making from the studio, and new ideas stalled; then the pandemic stopped commissions and suppliers shut down. An intended electric blanket ran out of parts, so Tegelaar turned to plywood and wire. Scaling the weave up dramatically, he found that each intersection naturally created a pocket where an LED could fit, and in an afternoon he had the essential principle of Tabby worked out.

He built another custom machine to automate the repetitive weaving while preserving the handcrafted quality, and after most lighting companies rejected the prototype he exhibited it at Big Art Amsterdam — selling several pieces within the first hour. Tabby woven lights have since been installed in LVMH flagship stores worldwide, appeared at Milan Design Week 2026 in his Oasis installation alongside Traces, and led to projects with Established & Sons and Barovier & Toso. "Making isn't part of my practice," he says. "It is my practice."