Lighting designer Volker Haug takes home 2025 Melbourne Design Week Award

Brunswick-based lighting designer Volker Haug has won the 2025 Melbourne Design Week Award, spotlighting two decades of local manufacturing and international acclaim.

Volker Haug, winner of the 2025 Melbourne Design Week Award presented by Mercedes-Benz Australia. Picture: Nichole Reed

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Former hairdresser-turned lighting designer Volker Haug has been awarded the prestigious 2025 Melbourne Design Week Award, but certainly doesn’t act like his name is up in lights.

The state-presented Melbourne Design Week, now in its ninth year, runs for 11 days across metropolitan and regional Victoria.

The latest iteration of the annual festival showcases local and international designers across more than 350 events and installations, including a two-decade retrospective of acclaimed Volker Haug Studios which found its start in a Richmond garage.

“I don’t know how it suddenly became 20 years, but it did,” Haug said.

Haug at work. Picture: Nichole Reed

Volker Haug Studios in Brunswick East. Picture: Nichole Reed

The presentation of German-born Haug with the festival’s major accolade celebrates his contribution to the Australian design industry and to Melbourne Design Week’s program.

An executive of presenting partner Mercedes-Benz, Jamie Cohen, said the brand was “honoured to present this prestigious and internationally recognised award to Volker Haug Studio”.

“I share everything with my team; if I get an award we get an award,” Haug said of the career milestone. “It’s not just me anymore these days, and hasn’t been for a long time.”

Collaboration and playfulness is at the centre of Haug’s studio practice, working with other design studios, manufacturers and artists within his own team.

“We do all the designing, but also the wiring, the metal treatments, the packaging. We do a lot of the manufacturing here,” he said.

Select elements including ceramics are sourced in Adelaide, and Murano glass travels to Brunswick East from the Venetian island. With the business having grown from a one-man show to now 20 employees and an international scope, Haug has learned to trust his collaborators.

“I think letting go and relaxing is the way to go,” Haug said of his design process.

His philosophy appears to have paid off. Lighting by Volker Haug Studio has appeared in Vogue Living, Architectural Digest, The New York Times, at Milan Design Week, and in homes and studios across the world.

Volker Haug with one of his designs. Photo: Nichole Reed

Speaking as the showcase of this success was being assembled around him, Haug reflected on his path to this point. “Your lightbulb comes on later on in life,” he quipped. Before entering the design world, Haug spent 20 years as a hairdresser.

“What I like about hairdressing is the connections that I have with people … you’re part of people’s lives and they’re part of your life as well,” he said.

This human-centric approach flowed naturally into his career in lighting. Some of Haug’s earliest opportunities came from his existing clients, who commissioned him based on their hairdressing relationship.

Gradually he found himself cutting hair at nights and on weekends while designing lighting during the day, until “eventually I had to put the scissors down because I got too busy.”

Fascinated with lighting from a young age, Haug was told by his parents that he “flicked switches on and off to the degree that they had to tape them down”.

This early interest evolved into tinkering with unusual light globes purchased with pocket money, and creating makeshift fixtures on a family holiday.

The innocent playfulness of these experiments shine through in his recent work through a dogged focus on materiality — light diffuses through sheets of raw fibreglass and is reflected by intimately textured gunmetal or gently rippling brass.