A new studio.Thirty-three years of craft.
KM Lighting Studio opened in 2023. What it carried inside wasn't new: Karen Mannheim had spent three decades lighting architecture before founding it.
It started by knocking on doors.
In the early nineties Karen came back to Lima with an idea and no office. She imported fixtures as a rep and knocked on doors — architecture studios, developers, whoever would see her. Two years of that.
The first office was fifty square meters in Surquillo. The first showroom came seven years later.
None of that changed when the studio grew. It's still someone walking into a site to see how the light turned out.
Karen has delivered more than 2,500 projects across six countries, working alongside studios like RAMSA, Oppenheim and Adriana Hoyos. But the number that matters most isn't on that list: after three decades and that scale, every project is still designed as if it were the only one.
What never changed: here light isn't decoration. It's the soul of the architecture.
Work prior to 2023 delivered under TRAZZO Lighting, directed by Karen Mannheim.
Karen Mannheim.
"I don't design light to be noticed. I design it so the room, the material, the person living there all feel inevitable."
Karen has spent more than three decades building one of the few lighting practices that works at the level of the world's most demanding architecture firms — and keeps the soul of a studio. She leads the design on every project the studio takes.
Leadership.
Architecture this complex needs partners who understand the stakes.