Ana Kraš and the Making of HAY’s Ava Lamps

Since its founding in Copenhagen in 2002, HAY has operated with a simple but radical premise: contemporary design should be accessible, expressive, and reflective of the ways we live today. Rooted in Denmark’s design heritage yet always looking forward, HAY has built its identity on collaboration with emerging designers, established creatives, and multidisciplinary thinkers who share a belief in design as both a cultural and a functional act. Rather than elevating objects to untouchable icons, HAY brings design back into everyday life: a chair that becomes part of your daily rituals, a glass that feels good in the hand, a lamp that softens a room. This democratic, joyful approach has helped shape a new global design culture; one that is colorful, sociable, optimistic, and deeply tied to how people actually live. It’s precisely within this cultural landscape that Ana Kraš has become one of HAY’s most distinctive voices. 

Serbian-born Ana Kraš is a designer whose work moves fluidly between object design, photography, art, and fashion. Trained in furniture design and interior architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Belgrade, she has developed a visual language marked by honesty, tactility, and an intuitive relationship with materials.Now living between Paris and New York, Kraš’s practice has grown into a recognizable aesthetic—handmade, sensitive, and grounded in the beauty of imperfection. Her objects often begin as personal improvisations or intimate gestures that later evolve into refined, manufacturable pieces. 

Her collaborations with HAY reflect this signature blend of spontaneity and craftsmanship. Previous to Ava, her contributions included the Bonbon Shades, which are known for their textile-wrapped sculptural forms, the Ram Series, and accessory designs such as the Perla Phone Holder, all of which capture her ability to translate tactile experimentation into industrial production without losing the soul of the original idea. But the Ava Lamp Collection stands out as one of her most personal and poetic collaborations yet.

Ava's story starts not in a studio, but in Kraš's Paris apartment. While setting up her new place in 2021, she'd rig together a makeshift lamp out of whatever she had within arm's reach-wire, paper, and some simple textile tape. The object had the quiet charm of something born from necessity: lightweight, intuitive, and atmospheric.

When Mette Hay, Creative Director of HAY Accessories, noticed the piece during a visit, she immediately recognized its potential. What started as a handmade one-off has now evolved into a full lighting series, including table lamps, wall lamps, floor models, and pendant versions. Delicate tension between fragility and durability is at the core of Ava. Where the forms reference classic paper lanterns, the lamps are crafted in a new material called ECOPET™, which is recycled PET that shows the same translucency as paper but has much more resilience.

Piping made of graphic fabric outlines each of the shapes, emphasizing their architectural qualities but with a softness that diffuses the light beautifully. The result is a gentle, ambient glow-warm, atmospheric, and quietly sculptural. Ava’s collection is composed of straightforward, but unique, geometric forms: cones, pyramids, squares, and cylinders. These universal geometric shapes provide a sense of grounding familiarity across the collection, while the combination of materials along with the methods of production provide an exceptionally modern aesthetic for the lamps. With their balanced combination of shape and materiality, the lamps fit into both clean, minimalist settings as well as warm, eclectic spaces and poetic, artful environments.

Simone Lorusso: Ana, the Ava lamp began as an improvised object in your Paris apartment. What was happening in that moment that made you pick up wire, paper, and tape and start building?

Ana Kraš: During the pandemic, I made an impromptu decision to move back to Europe  after ten years of living in New York. I put everything I owned into storage and came to Paris with almost nothing—just some clothes and a computer. When I found an apartment and moved in, I loved the emptiness of the space. It felt like the beginning of a new chapter. I had no furniture, no objects—nothing. I I didn't have any lamps, which was a problem because for me, beautiful light is the most important thing in a house. The next day I went to a lamp store, bought a few basic structures, brought them home, and started making a paper lamp. I’ve always loved paper—it’s something I collect—so I already had a large folder full of beautiful papers. I also used the black textile tape typically used in lamp-making, which created a contrast along the edges. That detail became the lamp itself —it exaggerated the contrast between the soft base shape and the angular top part.

SL: Mette, when you first saw Ana’s homemade lamp, what made you think, “This belongs at HAY”?

Matte Hay: With Ava, that was very clear from the beginning. The first time I saw it was in an image Ana shared from her apartment in Paris. It was a very immediate reaction – I just knew that I would love it to be a part of our collection, and luckily, she agreed. There was something very direct and honest about it. What I liked was that it felt almost like a sketch in space – very graphic, very precise, but still soft in its expression. Compared to Bonbon (another of Ana’s creations in the HAY collection), which is very tactile and colourful, Ava is more reduced, almost black and white in its thinking. But in both cases, the material is what gives the design its character.

SL: The final lamps use ECOPET™, a recycled material. How important was it to preserve that paper-like delicacy while shifting to something more durable?

AK: Ecopet is great because it comes from recycled bottles. it looks like paper and diffuses the light beautifully, but it's less fragile and meets all the safety standards globally. It's more consistent than paper which matters for objects produced in larger quantities. i work with paper too when i make some of my designs but these are more artisanal/ limited editions in which irregularity of paper adds to the design. For Ava series it wouldn't be the case.

MH:  For us, democratising design has never only been about price – it’s about making design that people feel connected to and want to live with. With Ava, we tried to stay very close to Ana’s original idea. That was important, because the strength of the design was already there. At the same time, we worked carefully to find the right material that could bring that idea into production without losing its quality. We ended up with ECOPET, which allowed us to keep the lightness and softness of the original while making it suitable for a wider audience. I think today, democratisation is also about responsibility –how things are made, how long they last, and how they fit into everyday life. But it’s equally about emotion. A product doesn’t need to be expensive or exclusive to feel special.

For me, the goal is always that someone can bring an object into their home and feel something – that it adds a small layer of atmosphere or meaning to their daily life. That’s when design becomes truly democratic.

SL: We live in a moment where handmade aesthetics coexist with industrial precision. How do you both see the value of imperfection, its emotional or cultural weight, in contemporary design?

AK: To me, it really depends on the object and the material. With Ava, the design is minimal and clean, and the precision adds to it. The Bonbon lamps—my student project from close to two decades ago, edited by HAY—are a great example of long manual weaving that’s executed so precisely it almost looks like an industrially made piece, yet we can still see that it’s handmade, and I think that combination is what made these lamps so popular.

On the other hand, there are dozens of copies of Bonbon lamps where we can see the same technique used in a way that doesn’t look neat and precise enough, and it ends up looking crafty, like a hobby project, rather than a finished design piece. In the lamps I hand-make for my brand Teget, I use handcrafted papers that carry a lot of imperfections within them, and I love to embrace those imperfections—they add a painterly look to the lamp.

SL: HAY has helped reshape global design culture by making good design widely accessible. How do you both interpret the idea of “democratizing design” today: culturally, ethically, and aesthetically?

AK: As a designer, I exist in both fields—the collectible design and the more available design that is widely produced. I approach the objects I design for each of these worlds differently.

I do think it’s more challenging to create a design that appeals to many, many people, and that is thoughtful in terms of production, so that the process is sustainable and can be scaled up. I must say that the idea of thousands of people at this point living with my designs, thanks to HAY, makes me very, very happy. I think that brands that make design available to a large number of people are very important, because they really shape the landscape of how we live at a certain time.

The combination of emotional clarity and technical excellence authentically conveys the philosophy that links Kraš and HAY. While functionality is an important aspect of the Ava collection, it also reflects current trends in industrial design toward an increased appreciation for hand-made products and a desire to own products that have histories and emotional connections. Despite being launched as a fully-produced product collection, the Ava collection holds on to some of the energy associated with its "improvisational" roots.



Ultimately, Ava isn't a lamp collection but an example of how small ideas, born in privacy within the quietness of daily life, could develop into meaningful objects for many. It also signals HAY's growing talent to recognize creativity in its raw form and shape into design that feels fresh yet timeless. 

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Words: Simone Lorusso